



^"-o 




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MACAULAY'S ESSAY ON 
ADDISON 



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I 



JOSEPH ADDISON 



MACAULAY'S ESSAY ON 

ADDISON 



EDITED AND ANNOTATED 

BY 

CHAELES WALLACE FEENCH 

PRINCIPAL OF THE HYDE PARK HIG^ SCHOOL, CHICAGO 



NciM gork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1898 
U. 

All rights reserved 



25264 






Copyright, 1898, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



9lV0U0FlESR£CtlVtD* 




NortoaolJ ^xcss 

J. S. Cushirg & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



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PEEFATORY NOTE 



The essay contained in this volume forms a part of 
the course prescribed by the Joint Committee on Eng- 
lish Requirements for admission to college. While it 
can hardly be rated as the greatest of Macaulay's 
essays, there are few, if any, which present a richer 
field for investigation and study. The student will 
need to have encyclopaedia and dictionaries constantly 
at hand, and even then he will probably find some 
allusions and references which will baffle his most 
patient effort. 

In the preparation of the notes the fact has been 
recognized that many students must take up this 
work without the necessary reference books; there- 
fore the allusions have been explained much more 
fully than would otherwise be necessary. 

Where it is possible, the student should not depend 
on the notes for his information, but should look up 
the references for himself. Much interesting infor- 
mation will be secured, and valuable habits of inves- 
tigation will be formed by a careful, independentj and 
exhaustive study of this masterpiece. 



INTRODUCTION 



In the preparation of the following introductory 
matter an effort has been made to present only that 
which will be available and useful to the average 
student. Critical analyses and discussions have been 
studiously avoided. 

Generally the introduction to a work of this class 
is carefully skipped by students, and sometimes, no 
doubt, wisely. Yet there is a certain kind and amount 
of introductory work which needs to be done in order 
to prepare the way for the proper study of any author, 
and it is hoped that the following pages will not 
altogether fail to meet this necessity. 



His heart was pure and simple as a child's 
Unbreathed on by the world : in friendship warm, 
Confiding, generous, constant ; and now 
He ranks among the great ones of the earth, 
And hath achieved such glory as will last 
To future generations," — Moultrie. 
vii 



Vlll INTRODUCTION 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the son of Zachary 
and Selina Mills Macaulay, was born at Eothley 
Temple, October 25, 1800. His father, a man of strict 
principles and stern and unyielding integrity, was 
associated with Wilberforce in his anti-slavery agita- 
tion, and spent the larger part of his life in works of 
charity and philanthropy. 

Young Macaulay was a child of such marked matu- 
rity of thought and expression that he became noted 
among the friends of the family for his quaintness and 
precocity, yet his nature was so frank and wholesome 
that he escaped the slightest taint of priggishness. 
Those qualities of person and mind which were marked 
in his later years appeared very early in life and 
developed rapidly. 

" Madame, the agony has already begun to abate," 
was the answer of the four-year-old boy to the solici- 
tous inquiry of a lady, when a careless servant spilled 
some hot coffee on his legs. Not long afterwards he 
edified a group of visitors in the drawing-room by 
walking into the room and exclaiming : 

" Cursed be Sallie ; for it is written, ' Cursed be he 
that removeth his neighbor's landmark.' " This 
scriptural malediction was directed against a serving- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH IX 

maid who had removed a row of oyster shells with 
which he had marked out the limits of his playground. 

He early formed the habit of holding a piece of 
bread and butter in his hand, from which he Avould. 
occasionally take a bite, when he was engaged in 
study. His mother one day told him he must break 
up the habit. " Yes, mamma," he replied, " industry 
shall be my bread and attention my butter." 

At the age of eight he had covered a wide range of 
reading, and had accumulated a large store of know- 
ledge, which his wonderfully retentive memory enabled 
him to use with considerable facility and force. He 
soon became accustomed to express his thoughts in 
both prose and poetry. His marvellously fertile mind 
began to pour forth its treasures at an age when the 
average child has not yet learned even to read; and 
though his earlier productions have not been deemed 
worthy of preservation, they gave abundant promise 
of the maturer work with which he was destined to 
enrich literature for all time. 

One of his productions was a paper which was 
intended to persuade the people of Travancore to 
embrace the Christian religion, of which his mother 
says : " On reading it, I found it to contain a very 
clear idea of the leading facts and doctrines of that 
religion, with some strong arguments for its adoption. 
Heroic poems, epics, odes, and histories flowed from his 



X INTRODUCTION 

pen like waters from a iiioiintaiii spring; and while 
they were often crude and boyish, they were the 
spontaneous expressions of a mind which was rapidly 
growing into a consciousness of its own productive 
power." 

His elementary education was secured at a small 
private school near Cambridge, where his individual 
peculiarities were allowed much freedom in their de- 
velopment, yet with sufficient guidance to coordinate 
them wisely. At the age of thirteen he wrote : 

"The books which I am at present employed in 
reading to myself are, in English, Plutarch's Lives 
and Milner's Ecclesiastical History ; in French, Eene- 
lon's Dialogues of the Dead. I shall send you back 
the volumes of Madame de Genlis's petit romans as 
soon as possible, and shonld be very much obliged for 
one or two more of them." 

He also formed a taste for fiction, which he read 
with such eagerness that very few novels in the 
English language escaped his eye. 

Notwithstanding his literary tastes and his absorption 
in his reading and studies, he never allowed school 
duties to encroach upon his love of home and friends, or 
to reconcile him to his "exile." At the beginning of his 
second half-year at school he writes to his mother : 

" My spirits are far more depressed by leaving home 
than they were last half-year. Everything brings 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH XI 

home to my recollection. You told me I should be 
happy when I once came here, but not an hour passes 
in which I do not shed tears at thinking of home." 

His biographer gives an illustration of his wonder- 
ful memory, which is referred to this period. While 
sitting in a Cambridge coffee-house he picked up a 
paper and read two poetical effusions which were 
printed in it, one called "Reflections of an Exile," 
and the other a parody on a Welsh ballad. He looked 
them once through, and his mind did not recur to 
them again for forty years, at the end of which period 
he was able to repeat them without changing a word. 
Joined with these retentive powers was the ability to 
assimilate the contents of a printed page almost at a 
glance. He would read a whole book while the aver- 
age reader would be covering a chapter. Nor was 
this merely "skimming," as he could always repeat 
the substance of the book from memory afterwards. 

He entered upon all branches of study with equal 
avidity, excepting only mathematics, which he always 
regarded with intense aversion and pursued only 
under protest. In regard to this subject he writes 
home from the University: 

••I can scarcely bear to write on mathematics or 
mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomi- 
nation for that science, if a name sacred to the useful 
and embellishing arts may be applied to the percep- 



Xll IXTRODUCTION 

tion and recollection of certain properties of numbers 
and figures. Oil that I had to learn astrology, or 
demonology, or school divinity; oh that I were to 
pore over Thomas Aquinas, and to adjust the relation 
of Entity with the two Predicaments, so that I were 
exempt from this miserable study! 'Discipline' of 
the mind ! Say rather starvation, confinement, tort- 
ure, annihilation! But it must be. I feel myself 
becoming a personification of algebra, a living trig- 
onometrical canon, a walking table of logarithms. All 
my perceptions of elegance and beauty are gone, or at 
least going. . . . But such is my destiny ; and since 
it is so, be the pursuit contemptible, below contempt, 
or disgusting beyond abhorrence, I shall aim at no 
second place." 

At Cambridge, as at the preparatory school, he 
excelled in literary and classical studies and was 
noted for his ready and somewhat boisterous conver- 
sational powers. He early became interested in polit- 
ical questions, and began to participate in political 
discussions. While at Cambridge he renounced the 
principles of the Tory party to which his father 
was attached, and became an ardent Whig, and after- 
wards became one of the trusted leaders of the party. 

In 1819 he won the Chancellor's medal for a poem 
on "Pompeii," and again in 1820 for a poem entitled 
" Evening." In 1822 he received his Bachelor's' degrree. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Xlii 

and in 1824 was elected to a fellowship, which was 
the more pleasing to him because it brought such 
deep gratification to his parents. 

His first literary efforts were contributed to KnighVs 
Quarterly Magazine, for which he wrote several arti- 
cles between June, 1823, and November, 1824. In 
this latter year he made his debut as a public speaker 
at an anti-slavery meeting, where he seems to have 
made a considerable impression by his eloquence and 
exhaustive treatment of the subject. 

In 1825 he contributed his essay on "Milton" to the 
Edinburgh Review, and for twenty years after he was 
a constant writer for this celebrated magazine. His 
"Milton" brought him wide renown, and made his 
name familiar to a wide circle of readers. While his 
work was scholarly, it was also popular and intensely 
interesting. Probably no other writer of the present 
century has so taken the world by storm as did 
Macaulay. The circulation of the Bevieiv increased 
with unexampled rapidity. In America his essays 
were reprinted in editions both cheap and expensive, 
and were not only sold in large quantities here but 
even found a large sale in the mother country. 

Macaulay imparted to his writings a peculiar charm 
from which even the casual reader cannot escape. His 
wide reading and wonderful memory enabled him to 
rpn-orp the whole field of literature and history ioj: his 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

illustrations and allusions, and also to impart a large 
amount of information, which, if not always strictly 
accurate, was invested in such picturesque and beauti- 
ful language that it appealed directly to the higher 
tastes of his readers and did much to quicken their 
intellectual life. 

In 1825 he received his Master's degree, and in 
1826 was called to the bar, but he very soon aban- 
doned his attempt to practise law and gave himself 
up to his literary work and to the pursuit of politics. 

His articles in the Edinburgh Review brought him 
a wide popularity, which, added to his powerful ad- 
vocacy of Whig principles, made it possible for him 
to enter Parliament, and in 1830 he was returned from 
the borough of Colne. 

His first speech was in favor of a bill to remove the 
civil disabilities of the Jews, and his second was di- 
rected against slavery in the West Indies. He also 
took a prominent part in the great debate on the 
Eeform Bill, and contributed materially to its final 
adoption. 

From this time his position, both in politics and 
society, was assured. He was probably the most prom- 
inent and influential member of his party in the House 
and was always listened to with interest and respect. 
He won renown not only for the eloquence and power 
of his speeches, but also for his readiness in debate. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH XV 

His great stores of information and his exhaiistless 
memory both combined to make him invincible in the 
hot battles that were then waged in Parliament. 

On July 10, 1833, he made an effective speech in 
favor of an important measure then under considera- 
tion, at the close of which one of the administration 
leaders gave utterance to his admiration in the follow- 
ing words : 

" I must embrace the opportunity of expressing, not 
what I felt (for language could not express it), but of 
making an attempt to convey to the House my sym- 
pathy with it in its admiration of the speech of my 
honorable and learned friend : a speech which, I will 
venture to assert, has never been exceeded within 
these walls for the development of statesman-like 
policy and practical good sense. It exhibited all that 
is noble in oratory ; all that is sublime, I had almost 
said, in poetry; all that is truly great, exalted, and 
virtuous in human nature. If the House at large felt 
a deep interest in this magnificent display, it may 
judge of what were my emotions when I perceived in 
the hands of my honorable friend the great principles 
which he expounded glowing with fresh colors and 
arrayed in all the beauty of truth." 

This generous tribute expressed no more than the 
common estimate of Macaulay's eloquence and logical 
power. 



XVI INTR OD UCTION 

In 1834 he was made president of a new Law Com- 
mission for India and member of the Supreme Council 
of Calcutta. The salary attached to these positions was 
large, and during his three years' residence in India he 
was enabled to acquire a competency which made him 
independent for the rest of his life. 

While in India he found time to continue his studies, 
and also to write several of his brilliant essays. It 
was at this time that he acquired the knowledge of 
Oriental life and history, which he afterwards used so 
effectively in his essays on Warren Hastings and 
Lord Clive. 

In 1838 he returned to England, and was at once 
elected to Parliament from Edinburgh. From 1839 to 
1841 he was Secretary of War and occupied a seat in 
the Cabinet. In 1842 he surprised the public by 
turning aside from his usual style of composition and 
publishing the "Lays of Ancient Eome," which at 
once became immensely popular, and have remained 
so to the present day, despite the fact that they have 
been condemned by critics as neither poetry nor his- 
tory. In 1844 he wrote his last essay for the Review 
and then gave himself up to the preparation of his 
History of England from the Time of James II., the 
first two volumes of which appeared in 1849. The 
event of their publication had been eagerly antici- 
pated by the public, and they sold so rapidly that the 



THE ESSAYS XVll 

publishers could hardly keep pace with the demand. 
The third and fourth volumes were not ready until 
1855. 

In 1847 he was defeated for reelection to Parlia- 
ment, but in 1852 was returned by his Edinburgh con- 
stituency without any effort on his part ; but he took 
little part in the struggles and deliberations of that 
body. 

During the latter part of Macaulay's life many dis- 
tinguished honors were conferred upon him. In 1849 
he was elected Lord Eector of the University of Glas- 
gow and Fellow of the Eoyal Society. In 1857 he 
was made a peer of the realm, under the title of Baron 
Macaulay of E-othley. In this same year he was 
elected Foreign Member of the French Academy, was 
given the Prussian Order of Merit, and was made 
High Steward, of Cambridge. But his hard and un- 
remitting labor had undermined his naturally strong 
constitution, and he died, December 28, 1859, when 
hardly past the prime of life. 



THE ESSAYS 



As a form of literature the essay is a relatively 
short disquisition upon some particular point or topic. 
It is not as formal and methodical as the more digni- 



XVlll INTRODUCTION 

fiecl treatise, and instead of giving a thorough and 
complete treatment of its subject, is comparatively 
superficial, and is designed, as a rule, to appeal to the 
popular taste rather than to the more limited circle 
of scholarly and profound thinkers for whom the 
treatise is primarily designed. 

The essay offers an opportunity for the bright and 
witty thinker to discourse confidentially upon subjects 
in which he is interested without being required to 
give to them an orderly and exhaustive treatment, or 
to make his work conform rigidly to all the canons 
of literary criticism. 

In the essay, more than in any other impersonal 
form of literary effort, the author is able to impress 
his own personality upon his work, so that oftentimes 
it assumes the freedom and variety and is often char- 
acterized by the individuality of the conversational 
monologue. It needs no profound student of litera- 
ture to recognize at once the author in sifcli essays 
as those of Bacon, Addison, Macaulay, or Matthew 
Arnold. 

This species of composition has been a favorite one 
from the time of Bacon, the great English philosopher, 
and Montaigne, the greatest French writer of the six- 
teenth century, who were the first of modern writers 
to use it distinctively. It is especially adapted to 
periodical literature, and if it has not risen to its 



THE ESSAYS XIX 

highest level, it has, at any rate, appeared in its most 
agreeable and attractive form in such publications as 
the Tatler, Sjiectator, and Edinburgh Review. It has 
been used as the vehicle for historical and biographi- 
cal sketches, literary and critical discussions, political 
arguments, and ethical and religious expositions. It 
has generally been written in prose, although Pope, 
in his essays on " Man " and " Criticism," has shown 
that it may appear in poetic form, without loss of 
freshness or vigor. 

Some authors, like Addison and Steele, have pro- 
duced the most of their literary work in this form, 
while others, like Cowley, have used it as a diversion, 
and have gained their reputation in other fields of 
literature. 

To the scholar essay -writing may seem to be a form 
of literary dissipation, which, persisted in, will make 
the writer incapable of close and sustained work along 
any single line. Whether this be true or not, it is 
certain that the essay has influenced beneficially a 
wider class of readers than any other form of compo- 
sition outside of fiction, and even fiction has done 
much less to disseminate useful information and to 
inspire thoughtful consideration of great questions. 

Unlike poetry and fiction, the modern essay has not 
undergone a process of evolution. In its essential 
characteristics it has not changed materially since its 



XX INTRODUCTION 

first appearance in the sixteenth century. A compari- 
son between the essays of Bacon and Montaigne and 
those of almost any modern writer will show differ- 
ences in the personal standpoint and style of treat- 
ment, but the essential elements of composition remain 
the same. The essay, like Athena, sprang full-grown 
and fully armed into the world of literature, and took 
its place at once as a finished and perfected product. 

The essays of Macaulay, which are probably the 
most brilliant in the whole range of literature, were 
contributed mainly to the Edinburgh lleview, a journal 
which had risen to an unequalled height of political, 
social, and literary power. To have the entry of its 
columns was to command the most direct channel for 
the spread of opinions and the shortest road to influ- 
ence and celebrity. 

Many of these essays were nominally book reviews, 
and were generally suggested by some book, whose 
unfortunate author found himself completely over- 
shadowed by his sometimes friendly, but frequently 
hostile, critic. In reality these productions are brill- 
iant essays, biographical, historical, and literary, and 
sometimes, though not often, really critical. Macau- 
laj^'s sympathy was too easily aroused, and his parti- 
sanship was too intense to permit him to employ 
either the cool temper of the critic or the calm im- 
partiality of the historian. 



THE ESSAYS XXI 

In the course of his reading MacauLay had accumu- 
lated an immense quantity and variety of facts, which 
his great retentive powers placed at his service when- 
ever he wanted to use them. Thus his essaj^s be- 
came exhaustless storehouses of information gathered 
from all fields of human learning and compacted with 
great ingenuity and skill into literary masterpieces. 
Although he composed with great rapidity, he never 
wrote carelessly or hastily. He gives an insight into 
his literary methods in a letter written to the editor 
of the Edinhurgli Review from Calcutta, November 
26, 1836, from which the following passage is taken : ^ 

" At last I send you an article of interminable length 
on Lord Bacon. I hardly know whether it is not too 
long for an article in the Review, but the subject is 
of such vast extent that I could easily have made the 
paper twice as long as it is. About the historical and 
political part there is no great probability that we 
shall differ in opinion ; but what I have said about 
Bacon's philosophy is widely at variance with what 
Dugald Stewart and Mackintosh have said on the 
same subject. . . . My opinion is formed not at sec- 
ond hand, like those of nine-tenths of the people who 
talk about Bacon ; but after several very attentive 
perusals of his greatest works and after a great deal 
of thought. ... I never bestowed so much care on 

1 See Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Macaulay, Vol. I., p. 47. 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

anything I have written. There is not a sentence 
in the latter half of the article which has not been 
repeatedly recast." 

Macaulay never intended to put his essays into 
permanent form, and several times refused the re- 
quest of his publishers to collect and edit them. But 
finally the popular demand became so great that 
American publishers issued unauthorized editions, 
which found a ready sale in England as well as 
in America. Influenced by this fact, he finally con- 
sented to edit and publish an authorized edition, to 
which he attached the following preface : 

"The author of these essays is so sensible of their 
defects that he has repeatedly refused to let them 
appear in a form which might seem to indicate that 
he thought them worthy of a permanent ^jlace in 
English literature; nor would he now give his con- 
sent to the re-publication of pieces so imperfect, if, 
by withholding his consent, he could make re-publica- 
tion impossible. But as they have been reprinted 
more than once in the United States, as many Ameri- 
can copies have been imported into this country, and 
as a still larger importation is expected, he conceives 
that he cannot, in justice to the publishers of the 
Edinburgh Review, longer object to a measure which 
they consider as necessary to the protection of their 
rights, and that he cannot be accused of presumption 



THE ESSAYS XXIU 

for wishing that his writings, if they are read, may be 
read in an edition freed at least from errors of the 
press and from slips of the pen. . . . 

''No attempt has been made to remodel any of the 
pieces which are contained in these volumes. Even 
the criticism on Milton, which was written when the 
author was fresh from college, and which contains 
scarcely a paragraph such as his matured judgment 
approves, still remains overloaded with gaudy and 
ungraceful ornament. The blemishes which have 
been removed were, for the most part, blemishes 
caused by unavoidable haste. The author has some- 
times, like other contributors to periodical works, 
been under the necessity of writing at a distance 
from all books and from all advisers, often trusting 
to his memory for facts, dates, and quotations, and 
of often sending manuscripts to the post without 
reading them over. What he has composed thus rap- 
idly has often been as rapidly printed. His object 
has been that every essay should now appear as it 
probably would have appeared when it was first pub- 
lished, if he had been allowed an additional day or 
two to revise the proof-sheets with the assistance of a 
good library." 



XXIV INTRODUCTION 

THE LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S 
AGEi 

A CONSIDERABLE nuHiber of England's most noted 
writers flourished during the life of Macaulay. At 
his birth the greatest poets of the preceding century 
were still in the fulness of their powers, while at his 
death the authors who have been so intimately con- 
nected with the glory of Victorian literature had 
already begun that brilliant work which has made 
this the most noteworthy period in the whole range 
of English literature. 

With few exceptions, the greatest English poets be- 
long to the nineteenth century. During its first quarter 
the world was dazzled by the genius of Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, Byron, Southey, Keats, and Shelley; and 
they had hardly passed from the stage when the first 
works of Browning and Tennyson were produced. 

iThe Joint Committee on English Requirements, at its session in 
New York in 181)7, recommended the study of the literary history of 
the various periods, to which the prescribed books belong, in connec- 
tion with their study. No attempt is made here even to sketch the 
literary history of this period further than is necessary to furnish 
a background or, what may be so called, a literary setting for 
Macaulay's works. A more extended study of the general features 
of the period may be carried on with profit ; yet it should not be 
forgotten that the great purpose of all literary study should be 
found in the thought of the author, and not in the details of his 
life history. 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S AGE XXV 

The history of this century contains the names of 
nearly all of the great masters of English fiction, of 
whom Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Buhver-Lytton, Miss 
Edge worth, Charlotte Bronte, and Miss Austen were 
contemporary with Macaulay. 

Two writers of his period may be fairly classed with 
our author, although they differed Avidely from him in 
many essential characteristics. These were De Quincey 
and Carlyle, who, with Macaulay, will easily rank among 
the greatest of English essayists. 

Like Macaulay, De Quincey began his literary career 
by contributing to periodical literature, but, unlike him, 
he also ended it there ; and he has the distinction of 
being the only great English prose writer who never 
wrote a book. Few writers since the time of Aristotle 
have covered so broad a field, and fewer still have 
proved themselves so thoroughly at home in every 
department of human thought and investigation, yet 
he never sustained any line of thought or investigation 
long enough to produce a work which may be called a 
real contribution to the intellectual life of the world. 
The literary value of his works is great, and in beauty 
and grace, as well as dignity, his style is hardly ex- 
celled; yet he cannot be ranked among the great 
masters of English thought. 

In this respect De Quincey was distinctly inferior 
to Macaulay and Carlyle, each of whom engaged in 



XXVI INTRODUCTION 

exhaustive research, and produced works that have 
enriched literature for all time. 

Many points of resemblance will be discovered be- 
tween De Quincey and Macaulay from a comparative 
study of their works. They were both indefatigable 
readers, and possessed of wonderful retentive powers. 
Both wrote for magazines on a wide range of topics. 
Each was gifted with peculiar beauties of style and 
with a remarkable exuberance of thought ; but in their 
personal characteristics they were at the antipodes. 
The one was retiring, introspective, and morbid ; the 
other was a man of affairs, and gifted with the power 
of leadership. Both were masters of the now almost 
forgotten art of conversation. 

Between Macaulay and Carlyle there were few 
resemblances and fewer elements of sympathy. They 
were both great prose writers, and interested in the 
same general class of subjects. Each was attracted to 
the study of history, and particularly to questions 
relating to political and social conditions ; but their 
view points were essentially antagonistic. The one 
was an interested participator in the political activi- 
ties of his times, and conducted his historical studies 
and investigations from the standpoint of a partisan, 
while the other was a philosopher, and almost a 
recluse. 

Yet while Macaulay is more attractive and, by the 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY^S AGE XXVll 

ordinary reader, much more easily understood and 
sympathized with, Carlyle is much the stronger char- 
acter, and his work has influenced English thought 
more profoundly. 

Macaulay's greatest work is read to-day more for the 
brilliancy of his style and the power and realism of his 
characterizations than for the accuracy of his judgments 
or his contributions to historical knowledge. On the 
other hand, Carlyle's Cromivell is not only good history, 
but it has reversed the judgment of the English people, 
and led to the recognition of its hero as the second 
founder of English liberties. His French Eevolutiou 
and Frederick the Great are perhaps the most note- 
worthy works of their class in the English language, 
and the latter practically exhausts the historical ma- 
terials of the period. Yet his most characteristic work 
is found in his literary and critical essays, which rise 
to a higher intellectual plane than any which preceded 
them, and have probably not been excelled by any 
similar productions in the whole range of literature. 

Among the poets who were strictly contemporary 
with Macaulay were Byron, Shelley, Keats, Southey, 
Coleridge, and Wordsworth. The last three were born 
between 1770 and 1775, but the greater part of their 
work was done during Macaulay's lifetime. All may 
be ranked among England's greatest poets. "Kubla 
Khan," '' Christabel," and " The Ancient Mariner" by 



xxviu IXTRODUCTIOX 

Coleridge, the " Ode on Intimations of Immortality " 
and " Lines written at Tintern Abbey " by Wordsv/orth, 
and the "Lyrics" of Shelley are among the noblest 
products of poetic genius to be found in any language. 

Another famous contemporary was Sydney Smith, 
the greatest of English wits, of whom Macaulay speaks 
characteristically in one of his letters as follows : 

"The other day as I was changing my neckcloth, 
which my wig had disfigured, my good landlady 
knocked at the door of my bedroom and told me that 
Mr. Smith wished to see me, and was in my room 
below. Of all names by which men are called there 
is none which conveys a less determinate idea to the 
mind than that of Smith. . . . Down I Avent, and, to 
my utter amazement, beheld the Smith of Smiths, 
Sydney Smith, alias Peter Plymley. I had forgotten 
his very existence till I discerned the queer contrast 
between the clerical amplitude of his person and the 
most unclerical wit, whim, and petulance of his eye. 
... I am very well pleased at having this oppor- 
tunity of becoming better acquainted with a man who, 
in spite of innumerable affectations and oddities, is 
certainly one of the wittiest and most original w^riters 
of our times. ... I have really taken a great liking 
to him. He is full of wit, humor, and shrewdness. 
He is not one of the show-talkers who reserve all 
their good things for special occasions. It seems to 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAU LAY'S AGE XXIX 

be his greatest luxuiy to keej^ his wife and daughters 
laughing for two or three hours every day." 

In the course of Macaulay's life he came into close 
personal acquaintance not only with political leaders, 
but with many of the more noted authors of his time. 
Many alhisions to them occur in his letters, which are 
interesting, as they indicate his mental attitude towards 
writers whose standing was not at that time estab- 
lished. A few of these allusions are quoted below. -^ 

" Pride and Prejudice and the five sister novels 
remained without a rival in his affections. He never 
for a moment wavered in his allegiance to Miss Aus- 
ten. In 1858 he wrote in his journal : ' If I could get 
materials I really would write a short life of that 
wonderful woman, and raise a little money to put up 
a monument to her in Winchester Cathedral.' " 

In a letter to his sister he says : 

" I am glad you have read Madame de Stael's Alle- 
magne. The book is a foolish one in many respects, 
but it abounds with information and shows great men- 
tal power. She was certainly the first woman of her 
age ; Miss Edgeworth, I think, the second ; and Miss 
Austen the third." 



1 These allusions and many more maybe found in Trevelyan's 
Life of Marnvlay, wliich is one of the few great biographies in the 
English language. Every student of Macaulay ought to be familiar 
with this work. 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

Of Lord Byron he says : 

" The worst thing that I know about Lord Byron is 
the very unfavorable impression he made upon men 
who certainly were not inclined to judge him harshly, 
and who, as far as I know, were never personally ill- 
used by him. I have heard hundreds and thousands 
of people, who never saw him, rant about him ; but 
I never heard a single expression of fondness for him 
fall from the lips of any of those who knew him Avell." 

The following extract from a letter to the editor of 
the Edinburgh Eeview is especially interesting : 

Oct. 19, 1842. 

^' Dear Napier : This morning I received Dickens's 
book. I have now read it. It is impossible for me to 
review it ; nor do I think you would wish me to do so. 
I cannot praise it, and I will not cut it up. I cannot 
praise it though it contains a few lively dialogues and 
descriptions ; for it seems to me to be on the whole a 
failure. ... A reader who wants an amusing account 
of the United States had better go to Mrs. Trollope, 
coarse and malignant as she is. A reader who wants 
information about American politics, manners, and lit- 
erature had better go even to so poor a creature as 
Buckingham. In short, I pronounce the book, in spite 
of some gleams of genius, at once frivolous and dull. 

^'Therefore I shall not praise it. Neither will I 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S AGE xxxi 

attack it; first, because I have eaten salt with Dick- 
ens ; secondly, because he is a good man and a man of 
real talent ; thirdly, because he hates slavery as heartily 
as I do; and fourthly, because I wish to see him en- 
rolled in our blue and yellow corps, where he may do 
excellent service as a skirmisher and sharpshooter." 

He had a great admiration for Miss Edgew^orth, the 
accomplished author of Castle liaclcrent, Ormond, Moral 
Tales, etc. 

"Among all the incidents connected with the publi- 
cation of his History, nothing pleased Macaulay so 
nmch as the gratification which he contrived to give 
Maria Edgeworth, as a small return for the enjoyment 
Avhich, during more than fifty years, he had derived 
from her charming writings. That lady, Avho was in 
her eighty -third winter and within a few months of 
her death, says, in the course of a letter addressed to 
Dr. Holland: ^And now, my good friend, I require 
you to believe that all the admiration I have ex- 
pressed for Macaulay's work is quite uninfluenced by 
the self-satisfaction, pride, surprise, I had in finding 
my own name in a note ! I had formed my opinion, 
and expressed it to my friends who were reading the 
book to me, before I came to that note. Moreover, 
there was a mixture of shame, and a tinge of pain, 
with the pleasure and pride I felt in having a line in 



XXXll IN TROD UCTION 

this immortal History given to tne, "vvlien there is no 
mention of Sir Walter Scott throughout the work, 
even in places where it seems impossible that the 
historian should resist paying the becoming tribute 
which genius owes, and loves to pay, to genius. . . . 
Meanwhile be so good as to make my grateful and 
deeply felt thanks to the great author for the honor 
which he has done me.' " 

Perhaps this omission may be explained by the fol- 
lowing passage from a letter to Mr. Napier. His 
estimate of the personal character of Scott is widely 
at variance with the facts as known to us. 

" Then, again, I have not, from the little I do know 
about him, formed so high an opinion of his character 
as most people seem to entertain, and as it would be 
expedient for the Edinburgh Revieiu to express. He 
seems to me to have been most carefully and success- 
fully on his guard against the sins which most easily 
beset literary men. On that side he multiplied his 
precaution, and set a double watch. Hardly any 
writer of note has been so free from the petty jeal- 
ousies and morbid irritabilities of our caste. But I 
do not think that he kept himself equally pure from 
faults of a very different kind, from the faults of a 
man of the world. In politics, a bitter and unscrupu- 
lous partisan; profuse and ostentatious in expense; 
agitated by the hopes and fears of a gambler ; perpet- 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S AGE xxxill 

ually sacrificing the perfection of his compositions, and 
the durability of his fame, to his eagerness for money ; 
writing with the slovenly haste of Dryden, in order 
to satisfy wants which were not, like those of Dryden, 
caused by circumstances beyond his control, but which 
were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious 
speculation ; this is the way in which he appears to me. 
I am sorry for it, for I sincerely admire the greater 
part of his works; tut I cannot think him a high- 
minded man, or a man of very strict principle." 

With this unfavorable estimate of Scott by Macau- 
lay it is interesting to compare that of the great critic, 
Taine, which is illustrated by the following extracts : 

"He (Sir Walter Scott) is a good Protestant, a 
good husband, a good father and very moral. . . . 
In critical refinement and benevolent philosophy, he 
resembles Addison. He resembles him again by the 
purity and endurance of his moral principles. His 
amanuensis, Mr. Laidlaw, told him that he was doing 
great good by his attractive and noble tales, and that 
young people would no longer wish to look in the 
literary rubbish of the circulating libraries. When 
Walter Scott heard this, his eyes filled with tears. 
On his death-bed he said to his son-in-law: 'Lock- 
hart, I have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, 
be a good man, — be virtuous, be religious, be a good 
man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when 



XXXIV 



INTRODUCTION 



you come to lie here.' This was ahnost his last word. 
By this fundamental honesty and this broad human- 
ity, he was the Homer of modern citizen life." 

It is possible that Macaulay's judgment may have 
been biased by the fact that while he was an ardent 
Whig, Scott was an equally ardent Tory. 



PROMINENT AUTHORS WHO WERE CONTEMPORARY 
WITH MACAULAY. 



Walter Savage Landor 

Jane Austen 

Maria Edgeworth 

Sydney Smith 

Leigh Hunt . 

Tliomas Carlyle , 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

Edward Bulwer (Lord Lytton) 

Alfred Tennyson . 

Charles Dickens . 

Robert Browning 

William M. Thackeray 

Lord Byron . 

Percy B. Shelley . 

Thomas De Quincey 

John Keats . 

Southey 

Coleridge 

Wordsworth 

Scott . 



1775-1864 
1775-1817 
1767-1849 
1771-1845 
1784-1859 
1795-1881 
1809-1861 
1805-1873 
1809-1892 
1812-1870 
1812-1889 
1811-1863 
1788-1824 
1792-1822 
1785-1859 
1795-1821 
1774-1843 
1772-1834 
1770-1850 
1771-1832 



SUGGESTIONS FOR THE STUDENT 



Eeading to be profitable must be careful and in- 
telligent. The careless and liasty reader not only 
fails to gain the knowledge and culture which are the 
legitimate products of all reading, but even dissipates 
his intellectual energies, and eventually destroys his 
ability to appreciate good literature. That method of 
reading only is intelligent which leads to a clear com- 
prehension of the author's spirit and intent; and its 
necessary conditions are a knowledge of his style and 
vocabulary and such a warm interest in the develop- 
ment of his line of thought and investigation as will 
serve for an inspiration to a careful and earnest study 
of his works. 

Much that is written in literary form is not worth 
the reading, but no true work of literature will ever 
fail to repay the student for his labor upon it. The 
wise selection of a course of reading is therefore a 
matter of the highest importance; yet there are so 
many prepared lists and helpful suggestions which 

XXXV 



xxxvi INTRODUCTION 

are easily accessible that no earnest student need go 
astray. 

Before beginning the study of an author it is well to 
learn something about his character and the position 
which he occupies in the literary history of his age. 
Oftentimes a knowledge of his personal life will lead 
to a better comprehension of his works. Such study 
should not be minute, and must be taken up not merely 
to satisfy curiosity, but Avith the sustained purpose of 
ascertaining, as far as possible, the sources of his 
inspiration and the general character and trend of 
his thought. 

Many authors who are thought to be obscure by the 
general reader are so only because their spirit and mo- 
tives are not understood, and therefore their literary 
productions seem illogical, and sometimes almost or 
quite meaningless. Browning, who is one of the 
richest and most fruitful of modern writers, furnishes 
a good illustration of this fact. The ordinary reader 
fails to understand him because he does not even 
apprehend his real personality and truest and deepest 
purposes ; and thus his language, which is so heavily 
laden with the rarest treasures of thought, becomes 
unintelligible. 

The student who is seeking to develop a love for good 
literature should never cultivate a critical or censorious 
spirit. His aim should be to search for the true and 



SUGGESTIOXS FOR THE STUDENT XXXVll 

the beautiful, aud uot to be ou the lookout for faults 
and blemishes. The acquisition of such a critical spirit 
must invariably blind the student to those very elements 
which alone are worth his study. 

If the student searches for faults in ^Macaulay's works 
he will surely find them, and often flagrant ones; but 
his aim should be far different from this. It is true 
that an intelligent reading of either Macaulay's Essays 
or his History cannot fail to disclose his faults ; but 
these should be passed over with as little notice as 
possible, and the attention concentrated upon the 
beauties of his style and thought. Aside from their 
brilliancy, there is a peculiarly magnetic equality in 
jMacaulay's works which at once wins the reader and 
brings him into close sympathy with their author. 
The student who studies him with an earnest purpose 
Vv'ill soon find himself under the sway of his magic, 
and his works will bo invested with an almost irre- 
sistible interest. 

It is a fundamental principle of all literary study 
that the student should first gain a fair knowledge of 
the work as a whole, the general trend of reasoning, 
and the conclusions which the author desires to estab- 
lish, before proceeding to an analytical and detailed 
study. So in taking up these essays the student should 
first read them through carefully without stopping to 
look up references or to verify allusions, in order to 



XXXVlll INTRODUCTION 

gain a general view of the whole field. Then he 
should turn back and begin a more or less exhaustive 
study of the essay, giving his attention mainly to 
the author's style and vocabulary, and to its general 
content. 

/ Macaulay's vocabulary was noted chiefly for its wide 
extent and for his good taste in the use of words. He 
displays no eccentricities, nor does he employ unusual 
or provincial forms of speech. In his choice of words 
he is both dignified and graceful. These and other 
characteristics should be carefully noted, but too much 
time should not be devoted to the study of words in 
this or in any other masterpiece. It must always be 
remembered that words are but the instruments by 
which thought is expressed, and only enough time 
should be given to their study to enable the student 
to master the intricacies of the author's thought. It 
is the living spirit which quickens, and words are but 
the vehicles by which it is conveyed. 

The second subject of study is the author's style, 
and it offers a most fruitful field for interesting and 
profitable investigation. Few authors have been char- 
acterized by a style at once so brilliant and so clear ; 
so florid and picturesque, and yet so simple and direct. 
His essays abound in imagery, comparisons, contrasts, 
and allusions. From his boundless stores of informa- 
tion he draws copiously and with marked spontaneity 



SUGGESTIONS FOR THE STUDENT xxxix 

illustrations of his subject which cover the widest 
possible range of human thought and life. He knows 
not only the great events and personages of the world's 
history and literature, but he evinces a remarkable 
familiarity with persons and deeds so inconspicuous 
as hardly to find mention in the most detailed annals 
of the past. The student who conscientiously follows 
out each allusion and illustration in any one of his 
greater essays will have to search through many dic- 
tionaries, encyclopaedias, and histories, and will acquire 
no small fund of useful and interesting information. 
And whoever does this will gain some idea of the 
wide range of reading, the indefatigable industry, 
and the marvellous memory of the author, who wrote 
many of these essays, as he himself says, afar from 
books and libraries, without an opportunity even to 
verify the references with which his memory supplied 
him so bountifully. 

The student should study carefully the various con- 
structive devices which he employs to convey his 
meaning, such as the balanced and periodical sentence ; 
the antithetical and climactic forms of expression; 
and the numerous rhetorical figures, such as pathos, 
the various forms of comparison and contrast, humor, 
hyperbole, irony, etc., all of which he frequently uses 
with power and effect. Numerous illustrations of all 
of these and others may be found in each essay, and 



xl INTRODUCTION 

they should be identified and studied both analytically 
and constructively. 

His style may be characterized briefly as clear, simple, 
animated, and strong. It has sometimes been called 
artificial, but the true lover of IMacaulay will find 
it the natural and artistic expression of his sym- 
pathetic mind, and not a series of labored devices to 
attract readers or impress his points. In the long run 
the popular verdict of a writer is the true one. Critics 
may still carp and cavil at the author of " Milton " 
and " The Lays," but by the popular tribunal he has 
been acquitted of their charges and placed forever 
among the great masters of thought and expression 
which the English-speaking world has produced. 

The last and most important topic of study is found 
in an author's purposes and the steps by which he at- 
tains them. And here the easiest and by far the most 
interesting part of the work is reached in a study of 
Macaulay. 

In his expression he is always clear and frank. No 
matter how radical his views, he never fears to utter 
them. He never indulges in obscurities or subtleties 
of thought. His opinions never lack definition ; and 
he never fails to express them so clearly that they 
cannot be misunderstood, and so forcibly that it seems 
almost presumption to attempt to discredit them. It 
is true that he is so vigorous a thinker, and becomes so 



SUGGESTIONS FOR THE STUDENT xli 

absorbed in the subject with which he is dealing at 
the moment, that he tends towards radical and ex- 
aggerated views, so that his subject becomes unduly 
exalted and the things with which he compares or 
contrasts it correspondingly depreciated. But it is 
by no means a harmful thing for a young person to 
come into an intimate acquaintance with a man who 
can be at one moment an impetuous lover and at the 
next moment a violent hater, and one who is not afraid 
to express his opinions and is never at a loss for vig- 
orous language to clothe them in. 

After having read the essay as a whole, the student 
should carefully look up and verify all its allusions 
and references, re-reading it in the light of his increased 
knowledge and expanded horizon. He should then 
make a paragraph summary, that is, he should express 
the main idea of each paragraph in a single pointed 
sentence, in proper order. From this summary he 
should proceed to make a skeleton of the essay by 
selecting the most important points, expanding them, 
and joining to them in their proper order and relation- 
ship the minor or subordinate elements, until a com- 
plete outline of the whole essay has been formed. 

This outline should then be studied, point by point, 
to ascertain whether Macaulay developed his thought 
in a careful and logical manner ; whether he followed 
his line of argument closely or indulged in digressions ; 



xlii INTRODUCTION 

whether the system of paragraphing is continuous and 
harmonious or is characterized by abru]3t changes ; 
whether the thought is expressed in plain language or 
in figured speech, and if so how the meaning is modi- 
fied or expanded ; does he in any point exaggerate 
or take a false position, and finally, having defined his 
purpose, has he attained it ? 

If this method of study is carefully followed out, 
and supplemented by a wider reading of Macaulay's 
works, it is believed that the student will not only be 
benefited intellectually, but that something of the 
author's strong sweet spirit will enter into his life to 
broaden and elevate it. 



LORD MACAULAY'S PROSE WRITINGS, WITH 
DATE OF PUBLICATION. 

Fragments of a Eoman Tale. June, 1823. 

On the Royal Society of Literature. June, 1823. 

Scenes from Athenian Revels. January, 1824. 

Criticisms of the Principal Italian Writers, No. I., Dante. 

January, 1824. 
Criticisms of the Principal Italian Writers, No. II., Petrarch. 

April, 1824. 
Some Account of the Great Lawsuit between the Parishes of 

St. Dennis and St. George in the Water. April, 1824. 
A Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John 

Milton touching the Great Civil War. August, 1824. 
On the Athenian Orators. August, 1824. 
A Prophetic Account of a Grand National Epic Poem, to be 

entitled "The Wellingtoniad," and to be published a.d. 

2824. November, 1824. 
On Mitford's History of Greece. November, 1824. 

Note. — Up to this time his essays were published in KnighVs 
Quarterly Magazine, but all the rest appeared in the Edinburgh 
Review. 

Milton. August, 1825. 
The West Indies. January, 1825. 
The London University. February, 1826. 
Machiavelli. March, 1827. 

Social and Industrial Capacities of Negroes. March, 1827. 
xliii 



xliv INTRODUCTION 

The Present Aibiiinistratioii. June, 1827. 

John Dryden. January, 1828. 

History. May, 1828. 

Hallani's Constitutional History. September, 1828. 

Mill on Government. March, 1829. 

Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill. June, 1829. 

Utilitarian Theory of Government. October, 1829. 

Southey's Colloquies on Society. January, 1830. 

Mr. Robert Montgomery's Poems. April, 1830. 

Sadler's Law of Population. July, 1830. 

Sonthey's Edition of Pilgrim's Progress. December, 1830. 

Sadler's Refutation Refuted. January, 1831. 

Civil Disabilities of the Jews. January, 1831. 

Moore's Life of Lord Byron, June, 1831. 

Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson. September, 

1831. 
Lord Nugent' s Memorials of Hampden. December, 1831. 
Rev. Edward Nave's Memoirs of Lord Burleigh. April, 1832. 
Etienne Dumont's Memoirs of Mirabeau. July, 1832. 
Lord Mahon's History of the War of the Succession in Spain. 

January, 1833. 
Horace Walpole. October, 1833. 
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. January, 183-4. 
Sir James Mackintosh. July, 1835. 
Lord Bacon. July, 1837. 
Sir William Temple. October, 1838. 
Gladstone on Church and State. April, 1839. 
Lord Clive. January, 1840. 
Von Ranke. October, 1840. 
Leigh Hunt. January, 1841. 
Lord Holland. July, 1841. 
Warren Hastings. October, 1841. 



PROSE WRITINGS xlv 

Frederick the Great. April, 1842. 

Madame D'Arblay. January, 1843. 

The Life and Writings of Addison. July, 1843. 

Barrere. April, 1844. 

The Earl of Chatham. October, 1844. 

Note. — The following biographies were contributed to the 
Eyicyclopsedia Britannica. 

Francis Atterbury. December, 1853. 
John Bunyan. May, 1854. 
Oliver Goldsmith. February, 1856. 
Samuel Johnson. December, 1856. 
William Pitt. January, 1859. 

In addition to these essays he wrote upwards of 
eighty short biographical sketches of persons more or 
less noted. 

In 1848 he published the first two volumes of his 
History of England from the Accession of James II. 

In 1852 the third and fourth volumes appeared. 
He was engaged in the preparation of the fifth 
volume, when he died. 



MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. 



Epitaph on Henry Martyn. 
Lines to the Memory of Pitt. 
A Radical War-Song. 



xlvi INTRODUCTION 

The Battle of Moncontour. 

The Battle of Naseby. 

Sermon in a Churchyard. 

Translation from A. V. Arnault. 

Dies Irae. 

The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad. 

The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge. 

Song. 

Political Georgics. 

The Deliverance of Vienna. 

The Last Buccaneer. 

Epitaph on a Jacobite. 

Lines written in August, 1847. 

Translation from Plautus. 

Paraphrase. 

Inscription on the Statue of Lord William Bentinck. 

Epitaph on Sir Benjamin Heath Malkin. 

Epitaph on Lord Metcalfe. 

Pompeii. 

The Battle of Ivry. 

The Armada. 

The Cavalier's March to London. 

The Lays of Ancient Rome : 

Horatius. 

The Battle of the Lake Regillus. 

Virginia. 

The Prophecy of Capys. 



ESSAY ON ADDISON xlvii 



THE ESSAY OK ADDISON 

This essay is one of the most popular of Macaulay's 
works, and deservedly so ; yet the student must not 
accept Macaulay's estimate of Addison as impartial 
or authoritative. He was an ardent admirer of Addi- 
son, and his enthusiasm led him to exaggerate his 
good qualities and blinded him to his defects. He 
has also sought to add to the renown of his hero by 
defaming his rivals, a course that is both ungenerous 
and unjust. Macaulay's treatment of both Pope and 
Steele in this essay is eminently unfair, and he weak- 
ens the effect of his argument materially by his invec- 
tive. His method of treatment deprives his work of 
much of its critical value ; but if this is borne in 
mind, the student will be prevented from forming an 
incorrect estimate of Addison as an author and man, 
while he will be profoundly influenced by the wonder- 
ful flow of thought, the brilliancy of diction, and the 
breadth of allusion which characterize the essay. 

It seems necessary to attempt to state here very 
briefly the position which Addison holds in the liter- 
ary history of England, as an antidote to Macaulay's 
somewhat extravagant eulogy. 

Johnson said of him: ^'He thinks justly, but he 



xlviii INTRODUCTION 

thinks faintly." A careful study of his works will 
show that he was never a profound student, and that 
his judgments, though clearly expressed and well 
defined, were in the main superficial. He lacked 
spontaneity and vigor of thought, and frequently 
seemed to expend his vitality in seeking smooth 
and free expression rather than in elaborating his 
subject-matter. He added to this a lack of sympathy 
and imaginative power, which would have been fatal 
to almost any other species of composition than that 
in which he was engaged. 

As a poet Addison was distinctly a failure. In true 
poetic genius he was utterly lacking. At the best, 
he was but a writer of political verses and academic 
memoirs. Had he not come under the influence of 
Swift and Steele he would probably never have been 
known as anything more than a clever versifier, and 
would have held no considerable place in English 
literature. 

The most of his work, and by far the best, consists 
of contributions to the periodicals of the day, which 
his genius and that of Steele have given a high rank 
in English literature. So excellent was this work that, 
although they have had many followers and rivals, 
the Spectator and Tatler have never been equalled in 
brightness, humor, and literary merit. 

Macaulay indulges in too exuberant praise of Addi- 



ESSAY OM ADDISON xlix 

son's literary style, which is, indeed, in many ways 
admirable, but is not by any means above legitimate 
criticism. Lord Lytton says that Addison's com- 
mand of expression was not first-rate. While his style 
is easy and flowing, and often highly polished, it 
is frequently loose to the verge of vagueness, and is 
lacking in strength, sublimity, and vigor. Johnson 
says, "He was a model of the middle style, — always 
equable, always easy, without glowing words or j)ointed 
sentences." 

In conclusion, it may be said that elegance is the 
ruling quality of Addison's style. To the superficial 
harmony and smoothness of his sentences he sacrifices 
vigor and depth of thought. As a master of this style 
of expression he is easily first ; but as a vigorous, keen 
thinker, a logical reasoner, and a careful student, he is 
far from deserving all the praise which Macaulay heaps 
upon him. Yet, while he cannot be placed in the first 
rank of English authors, he was probably the greatest 
prose writer of his age. 



ADDISON 1 

{Edinburgh Review, July, 1843) 

Some reviewers are of opinion that a lady who dares 
to publish a book renounces by that act the franchises ° 
appertaining to her sex, and can claim no exemption 
from the utmost rigor of critical procedure. From 
that opinion we dissent. We admit, indeed, that in a 
country which boasts of many female writers, emi- 
nently qualified by their talents and acquirements to 
influence the public mind, it would be of most perni- 
cious consequence that inaccurate history or unsound 
philosophy should be suffered to pass uncensured, lo 
merely because the offender chanced to be a lady. 
But we conceive that, on such occasions, a critic 
would do well to imitate the courteous Knight ° who 
found himself compelled by duty to keep the lists 

^ The TAfe of Joseph Addison. By Lucy Aikin. 2 vols. 8 vo. 
London, 1843. 

B 1 



2 ADDISON 

against Bradaiuaiite.° He, we are told, defended suc- 
cessfully the cause of which he was the champion; 
but before the fight began, exchanged Balisarda° for 
a less deadly sword, of which he carefully blunted the 
point and edge. 

Nor are the immunities of sex the only immunities 
which Miss Aikin may rightfully plead. Several of 
her works, and especially the ver}^ pleasing Memoirs 
of the Eeigu of James the First, have fully entitled 
I her to the privileges enjoyed by good writers. One of 
those privileges we hold to be this, that such writers, 
when, eitiier from the unlucky choice of a subject, or 
from the indolence too often produced by success, 
they happen to fail, shall not be subjected to the 
severe discipline which it is sometimes necessary to 
inflict upon dunces and impostors, but shall merely 
be reminded by a gentle touch, like that with which 
the Laputan flapper ° roused his dreaming lord, that it 
is high time to wake. 

) Our readers will probably infer from what we have 
said that Miss Aikin's book has disappointed us. 
The truth is, that she is not well acquainted with her. 
subject. No person who is not familiar with the 
political and literary history of England during the 
reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George 



ADDISON 3 

the First, can possibly write a good life of Addison. 
Now, we mean no reproach to Miss Aikin, and many 
will think that we pay her a compliment, when we say 
that her studies have taken a different direction. She 
is better acquainted with Shakespeare and Ealeigh,° 
than with Congreve ° and Prior °; and is far more at 
home among the ruffs and peaked beards of Theo- 
bald's ° than among the Steenkirks ° and flowing peri- 
wigs which surrounded Queen Anne's tea table at • 
Hampton. ° She seems to have written about the Eliza- lo 
bethan age, because she had read much about it; she 
seems, on the other hand, to have read a little about 
the age of Addison, because she had determined to 
write about it. The consequence is that she has had 
to describe men and things without having either a 
correct or a vivid idea of them, and that she has often 
fallen into errors of a very serious kind. The repu- 
tation which Miss Aikin has justly earned stands so 
high, and the charm of Addison's letters is so great, 
that a second edition of this work may probably be 20 
required. If so, we hope that every paragraph will 
be revised, and that every date and fact about which 
there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully 
verified. 

To Addison himself we are bound by a sentiment 



4 ADDISON 

as much like affection as any sentiment can be, which 
is inspired by one who has been sleeping a hundred 
and twenty years in Westminster Abbey. We trust, 
however, that this feeling will not betray us into that 
abject idolatry which we have often had occasion to 
reprehend in others, and which seldom fails to make 
both the idolater and the idol ridiculous. A man of 
genius and virtue is but a man. All his powers cannot 
be equally developed; nor can we expect from him 

10 perfect self-knowledge. We need not, therefore, 
hesitate to admit that Addison has left us some com- 
positions which do not rise above mediocrity, some 
heroic poems hardly equal to Parnell's,° some criticism 
as superficial as Dr. Blair's, ° and a tragedy not very 
much better than Dr. Johnson's. ° It is praise enough 
to say of a writer that, in a high department of litera- 
ture, in which many eminent writers have distin- 
guished themselves, he has had no equal; and this 
may with strict justice be said of Addison. 

20 As a man, he may not have deserved the adoration 
which he received from those who, bewitched by his 
fascinating society, and indebted for all the comforts 
of life to his generous and delicate friendship, wor- 
shippedhim nightly, inhis favorite temple at Button's. ° 
But, after full inquiry and impartial reflection, we 



ADDISON 5 

have long been convinced that lie deserved as mnch 
love and esteem as can be justly claimed by any of our 
infirm and erring race. Some blemishes may undoubt- 
edly be detected in his character ; but the more care- 
fully it is examined, the more will it appear, to use 
the phrase of the old anatomists, sound in the noble 
parts, free from all taint of perfidy, of cowardice, of 
cruelty, of ingratitude, of envy. Men may easily be 
named, in whom some particular good disposition has 
been more conspicuous than in Addison. But the just lo 
harmony of qualities, the exact temper between the 
stern and the humane virtues, the habitual observance 
of every law, not only of moral rectitude, but of moral 
grace and dignity, distinguish him from all men who 
have been tried by equally strong temptations, and 
about whose conduct we possess equally full in- 
formation. 

His father was the Eeverend Lancelot Addison, 
who, though eclipsed by his more celebrated son, made 
some figure in the world, and occupies with credit two 20 
folio pages in the Biographia Britannica.° Lancelot 
was sent up, as a poor scholar, from Westmoreland to 
Queen's College, ° Oxford, in the time of the Common- 
wealth, made some progress in learning, became, like 
most of his fellow students, a violent Royalist, lam- 



G ADDISON 

pooned the heads of the Universit}^, and was forced 
to ask pardon on his bended knees. When he had 
left college, he earned a humble subsistence by read- 
ing the liturgy of the fallen Church to the families of 
those sturdy squires whose manor houses were scat- 
tered over the Wild of Sussex. ° After the Restoration, 
his loyalty was rewarded with the post of chaplain to 
the garrison of Dunkirk. ° When Dunkirk was sold 
to France, he lost his employment. But Tangier ° had 

lobeen ceded by Portugal to England as part of the 
marriage portion of the Infanta ° Catharine; and to 
Tangier Lancelot Addison was sent. A more miser- 
able situation can hardly be conceived. It was diffi- 
cult to say whether the unfortunate settlers were 
more tormented by the heats or by the rains, by the 
soldiers within the wall or by the Moors without it. 
One advantage the chaplain had. He enjoyed an ex- 
cellent opportunity of studying the history and man- 
ners of Jews and Mahometans ; and of this opportunity 

20 he appears to have made excellent use. On his return 
to England, after some years of banishment, he pub- 
lished an interesting volume on the Polity and Reli- 
gion of Barbary, and another on the Hebrew Customs 
and the State of Rabbinical learning. He rose to 
eminence in his profession, and became one of the 



ADDISON 7 

royal chaplains, a Doctor of Divinity, Archdeacon of 
Salisbury, and Dean of Lichfield. It is said that he 
would have been made a bishop after the E evolution, 
if he had not given offence to the government by 
strenuously opposing, in the Convocation of 1689, the 
liberal policy of William and Tillotson.° 

In 1672, not long after Dr. Addison's return from 
Tangier, his son Joseph was born. Of Josc^dIi's 
childhood we know little. He learned his rudiments 
at schools in his father's neighborhood, and was then 
sent to the Charter House. ° The anecdotes which are 
popularly related about his boyish tricks do not har- 
monize very well with what we know of his riper 
years. There remains a tradition that he was the 
ringleader in a barring out, and another tradition that 
he ran away from school and hid himself in a wood, 
where he fed on berries and slept in a hollow tree, till 
after a long search he was discovered and brought 
home. If these stories be true, it would be curious 
to know by what moral discipline so mutinous and 
enterprising a lad was transformed into the gentlest 
and most modest of men. 

We have abundant proof that, whatever Joseph's 
pranks may have been, he pursued his studies vigor- 
ously and successfully. At fifteen he was not only 



20 



8 ADDISON 

fit for the university, but carried thither a classical 
taste and a stock of learning which would have done 
honor to a Master of Arts. He was entered at Queen's 
College, Oxford; but he had not been many months 
there, when some of his Latin verses fell by accident 
into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, Dean of Magdalene 
College. ° The young scholar's diction and versifica- 
tion were already such as veteran professors might 
envy. Dr. Lancaster was desirous to serve a boy of 

10 such promise; nor was an opportunity long wanting. 
The Revolution had just taken place; and nowhere 
had it been hailed with more delight than at Magda- 
lene College. That great and opulent corporation had 
been treated by James, and by his Chancellor, with 
an insolence and injustice which, even in such a 
Prince and in such a Minister, may justly excite 
amazement, and which had done more than even the 
prosecution of the Bishops to alienate the Church of 
England from the throne. A president, ° duly elected, 

20 had been violently expelled from his dwelling: a 
Papist had been set over the society by a royal man- 
date: the Pellows who, in conformity with their 
oaths, had refused to submit to this usurper, had been 
driven forth from their quiet cloisters and gardens, to 
die of want or to live on charity. But the day of re- 



ADDISON 9 

dress and retribution speedily came. The intruders 
were ejected: the venerable House was again inhab- 
ited by its old inmates : learning flourished under the 
rule of the wise and virtuous Hough ; and with learn- 
ing was united a mild and liberal spirit too often 
wanting in the princely colleges of Oxford. In con- 
sequence of the troubles through which the society 
had passed, there had been no valid election of new 
members during the year 1688. In 1689, therefore, 
there was twice the ordinary number of vacancies; and lo 
thus Dr. Lancaster found it easy to procure for his 
young friend admittance to the advantages of a foun- 
dation then generally esteemed the wealthiest in 
Europe. 

At Magdalene Addison resided during ten years. 
He was, at first, one of those scholars who are called 
Demies, ° but was subsequently elected a Fellow. His 
college is still proud of his name : his portrait still 
hangs in the hall; and strangers are still told that his 
favorite walk was under the elms which fringe the 20 
meadow on the banks of the Cherwell. It is said, 
and is highly probable, that he was distinguished 
among his fellow students by the delicacy of his feel- 
ings, by the shyness of his manners, and by the as- 
siduity with which he often prolonged his studies far 



10 ADDISON 

into the night. It is certain that his reputation for 
ability and learning stood high. Many years later, 
the ancient doctors of Magdalene continued to talk 
in their common room of his boyish compositions, and 
expressed their sorrow that no copy of exercises so 
remarkable had been preserved. 

It is proper, however, to remark that Miss Aikin 
has committed the error, very pardonable in a lady, 
of overrating Addison's classical attainments. In 

10 one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency 
was such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His 
knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius ° and 
Catullus ° down to Claudian ° and Prudentius,° was 
singularly exact and profound. He understood them 
thoroughly, entered into their spirit, and had the 
finest and most discriminating perception of all their 
peculiarities of style and melody; nay, he copied 
their manner with admirable skill, and surpassed, we 
think, all their British imitators who had preceded 

20 him, Buchanan ° and Milton alone excepted. This is 
high praise; and beyond this we cannot with justice 
go. It is clear that Addison's serious attention during 
his residence at the university, was almost entirely 
concentrated on Latin poetry, and that, if he did not 
wholly neglect other provinces of ancient literature, 



ADDISON 11 

lie vouchsafed to them only a cursory glance. He 
does not appear to have attained more than an ordi- 
nary acquaintance with the political and moral writ- 
ers of Kome ; nor was his own Latin prose by any means 
equal to his Latin verse. His knowledge of Greek, 
though doubtless such as was, in his time, thought 
respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than that 
which many lads now carry away every year from 
Eton and Kugby. A minute examination of his 
works, if we had time to make such an examination, lo 
Avould fully bear out these remarks. We will briefly 
advert to a few of the facts on which our judgment is 
guounded. 

Great praise is due to the Notes which Addison ap- 
pended to his version of the second and third books 
of the Metamorphoses. ° Yet those notes, while they 
show him to have been, in his own domain, an accom- 
plished scholar, show also how confined that domain 
was. They are rich in apposite references to Virgil, 
Statins, ° and Claudian ; but they contain not a single 20 
illustration drawn from the Greek poets. Now, if, 
in the whole compass of Latin literature, there be a 
passage which stands in need of illustration drawn 
from the Greek poets, it is the story of Pentheus ° in 
the third book of the Metamorphoses. 0\dd was in- . 



12 ADDISON 

debted for that story to Euripides ° and Theocritus, ° 
both of whom he has sometimes followed minutely. 
But neither to Euripides nor to Theocritus does Addi- 
son make the faintest allusion; and we, therefore, 
believe that we do not wrong him by supposing that 
he had little or no knowledge of their works. 

His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical 
quotations happily introduced; but scarcely one of 
those quotations is in prose. He draws more illustra- 

10 tions from Ausonius ° and Manilius ° than from Cicero. 
Even his notions of the political and military affairs 
of the Romans seem to be derived from poets and 
poetasters. Spots made memorable by events which 
have changed the destinies of the world, and which 
have been worthily recorded by great historians, bring 
to his mind only scraps of some ancient versifier. In 
the gorge of the Apennines he naturally remembers 
the hardships which Hannibal's army endured, and 
proceeds to cite, not the authentic narrative of Polyb- 

2oius,° not the picturesque narrative of Livy,° but the 
languid hexameters of Silius Italicus.° On the banks 
of the Eubicon he never thinks of Plutarch's ° lively 
description, or of the stern conciseness of the Com- 
mentaries, or of those letters to Atticus ° which so 
forcibly express the alternations of hope and fear in a 



ADDISON 13 

sensitive mind at a great crisis. His only authority 
for the events of the civil war is Lucan.° 

All the best ancient works of art at Rome and Flor- 
ence are Greek. Addison saw them, however, without 
recalling one single verse of Pindar, ° of Callimachus,° 
or of the Attic dramatists ; but they brought to his 
recollection innumerable passages of Horace, ° Juve- 
nal, ° Statins, and Ovid. 

The same may be said of the Treatise on Medals. 
In that pleasing work we find about three hundred lo 
passages extracted with great judgment from the 
lioman poets; but we do not recollect a single passage 
taken from any Roman orator or historian; and we 
are confident that not a line is quoted from any Greek 
writer. No person, who had derived all his informa- 
tion on the subject of medals from Addison, would 
suspect that the Greek coins were in historical interest 
equal, and in beauty of execution far superior, to 
those of Rome. 

If it were necessary to find any further proof that 20 
Addison's classical knowledge was confined within 
narrow limits, that proof would be furnished by his 
Essay on the Evidences of Christianity. The Roman 
poets throw little or no light on the literary and his- 
torical questions which he is under the necessity of 



14 ADDISON 

examining in that Essay. He is, therefore, left com- 
pletely in the dark ; and it is melancholy to see how 
helplessly he gropes his way from blunder to blunder. 
He assigns, as grounds for his religious belief, stories 
as absurd as that of the Cock-Lane ghost,° and forgeries 
as rank as Ireland's Vortigern,° puts faith in the lie 
about the Thundering Legion, ° is convinced that Tibe- 
rius moved the senate to admit Jesus among the gods, 
and pronounces the letter of Agbarus° King of Edessa 

10 to be a record of great authority. Nor were these 
eri'ors the effects of superstition ; for to superstition 
Addison was by no means prone. The truth is that he 
was writing about what he did not understand. 

Miss Aikin has discovered a letter from Avhich it 
appears that, while Addison resided at Oxford, he was 
one of the several writers whom the booksellers en- 
gaged to make an English version of Herodotus ; and 
she infers that he must have been a good Greek scholar. 
We can allow very little weight to this argument, 

20 when we consider that his fellow-laborers were to have 
been Boyle ° and Blackmore.° Boyle is remembered 
chiefly as the nominal author of the Avorst book on 
Greek history and philology that ever was printed ; 
and this book, bad as it is, Boyle was unable to produce 
without hel}). Of Blackmore's attainments in the 



ADDISON 15 

ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his 
prose he has confounded an aphorism with an apoph- 
thegm, and that when, in his verse, he treats of 
classical subjects, his habit is to regale his readers 
with four false quantities to a page. 

It is probable that the classical acquirements of 
Addison were of as much service to him as if they had 
been more extensive. The world generally gives its 
admiration, not to the man who does what nobody else 
even attempts to do, but to the man who does best lo 
what multitudes do well. Bentley ° was so immeasu- 
rably superior to all the other scholars of his time that 
few among them could discover his superiority. But 
the accomplishment in which Addison excelled his 
contemporaries was then, as it is now, highly valued 
and assiduously cultivated at all English seats of learn- 
ing. Everybody who had been at a public school had 
written Latin verses ; many had written such verses 
with tolerable success, and were quite able to appre- 
ciate, though by no means able to rival, the skill with 20 
which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Ba- 
rometer ° and the Bowling Green ° were applauded by 
hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles 
of Phalaris ° was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics 
on an obelisk. 



16 ADDISON 

Purity oi style, and an easy flow of numbers, are 
common to all Addison's Latin poems. Our favorite 
piece is the Battle of the Cranes and Pygmies ; for in 
that piece we discern a gleam of the fancy and humor 
which many years later enlivened thousands of break- 
fast tables. Swift boasted that he was never known 
to steal a hint ; and he certainly owed as little to his 
predecessors as any modern writer. Yet we cannot 
help suspecting that he borrowed, perhaps uncon- 
lo sciously, one of the happiest touches in his Voyages 
to Lilliput from Addison's verses. Let our readers 
judge. 

"The Emperor," says G-uUiver, "is taller by about 
the breadth of my nail than any of his court, which 
alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders." 

About thirty years before Gulliver's Travels ap- 
peared, Addison wrote these lines : 

** Jamque acies inter niedias sese arduus infert 
Pygmeadum ductor, qui, maj estate verendus, 
20 Incessuque gravis, reliquos supereminet omnes 

Mole gigantea, mediamque exsurgit in uluam."° 

The Latin poems of Addison were greatly and justly 
admired both at Oxford and Cambridge, before his 
name had ever been heard by the wits who thronged 
the coffee-houses round Drury Lane theatre. ° In his 



ADDISON 17 

twenty-second year, he ventured to appear before the 
public as a Avriter of English verse. He addressed 
some complimentary lines to Dryden,° who, after many 
triumphs and many reverses, had at length reached a 
secure and lonely eminence among the literary men of 
that age. Dry den appears to have been much gratified 
by the young scholar's praise ; and an interchange 
of civilities and good offices followed. Addison was 
probably introduced by Dryden to Congreve,° and 
was certainly presented by Congreve to Charles Mon- lo 
tague,° who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and 
leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons. 

At this time Addison seemed inclined to devote 
himself to poetry. He published a translation of part 
of the fourth Georgic, Lines to King William, and 
other performances of equal value, that is to say, of 
no value at all. But in those days, the public was 
in the habit of receiving with applause pieces which 
would now have little chance of obtaining the Newdi- 
gate prize ° or the Seatonian prize.° And the reason 20 
is obvious. The heroic couplet ° was then the favorite 
measure. The art of arranging words in that measure, 
so that the lines may flow smoothly, that the accents 
may fall correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear 
strongly, and that there may be a pause at the end of 



18 ADDISON 

every distich, is an art as meclianical as that of mend- 
ing a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned 
by any human being who has sense enough to learn. 
But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradually 
improved by means of many experiments and many 
failures. It was reserved for Pope to discover the 
trick, to make himself complete master of it, and to 
teach it to everybody else. From the time when his 
Pastorals appeared, heroic versification became a 

10 matter of rule and compass; and, before long, all 
artists were on a level. Hundreds of dunces who 
never blundered on one happy thought or expression 
were able to write reams of couplets which, as far as 
euphony Avas concerned, could not be distinguished 
from those of Pope himself, and which very clever 
writers of the reign of Charles the Second, Rochester," 
for example, or Marvel,° or 01dham,° would have con- 
templated with admiring despair. 

Ben Jonson° was a great man, Hoole° a very small 

20 man. But Hoole, coming after Pope, had learned how 
to manufacture decasyllabic verses, and poured them 
forth by thousands and tens of thousands, all as well 
turned, as smooth, and as like each other as the blocks 
which have passed through Mr. Brunei's ° mill in the 
dockyard at Portsmouth. Ben's heroic couplets resem- 



ADDISON 19 

ble blocks rudely hewn out by an unpractised hand 
with a blunt hatchet. Take as a specimen his trans- 
lation of a celebrated passage in the ^neid : 

"This child our parent earth, stirred up with spite 
Of all the gods, brought forth, and, as some write, 
She was last sister of that giant race 
That sought to scale Jove's court, right swift of pace, 
And swifter far of wing, a monster vast 
And dreadful. Look, how many plumes are placed 
On her huge corpse, so many waking eyes 
Stick underneath, and, which may stranger rise 
In the report, as many tongues she wears." 

Compare with these jagged misshapen distichs the 
neat fabric which Hoole's machine produces in unlim- 
ited abundance. We take the first lines on which we 
open in his version of Tasso.° They are neither better 
nor worse than the rest : 

" O thou, whoe'er thou art, whose steps are led, 
By choice or fate, these lonely shores to tread, 
No greater wonders east or west can boast 
Than yon small island on the pleasing coast. 
If e'er thj^ sight would blissful scenes explore. 
The current pass, and seek the further shore." 

Ever since the time of Pope there has been a glut 
of lines of this sort, and we are now as little disposed 
to admire a man for being able to write them, as for 



20 ADDISON- 

being able to write his name. But in the days of 
AVilliam the Third such versification was rare ; and a 
rhymer who had any skill in it passed for a great poet, 
just as in the dark ages a person who could write his 
name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke,° 
Stepney,° Granville, ° Walsh, ° and others, whose only 
title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what 
might have been as well said in prose, or what was 
not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of 

10 distinction which ought to be reserved for genius. 
With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not 
earned true and lasting glory by performances which 
very little resembled his juvenile poems. 

Dryden was now busied with Virgil, and obtained 
from Addison a critical preface to the Georgics. In 
return for this service, and for other services of the 
same kind, the veteran poet, in the postscript to the 
translation of the ^neid, complimented his young 
friend with great liberality, and indeed with more lib- 

20 erality than sincerity. He affected to be afraid that 
his own performance would not sustain a comparison 
with the version of the fourth Georgic, by " the most 
ingenious Mr. Addison of Oxford." " After his bees," ° 
added Dryden, "my latter swarm is scarcely worth 
the hivinof." 



ADDISON 21 

The time had now arrived when it was necessary 
for Addison to choose a calling. Everything seemed 
to point his course towards the clerical profession. 
His habits were regular, his opinions orthodox. His 
college had large ecclesiastical preferment in its gift^ 
and boasts that it has given at least one bishop to 
almost every see in England. Dr. Lancelot Addison 
held an honorable place in the Church, and had set his 
heart on seeing his son a clergyman. It is clear, from 
some expressions in the young man's rhymes, that his lo 
intention was to take orders. But Charles Montague 
interfered. Montague had first brought himself into 
notice by verses, well timed and not contemptibly 
written, but never, we think, rising above mediocrity. 
Fortunately for himself and for his country, he early 
quitted poetry, in which he could never have attained 
a rank as high as that of Dorset ° or Rochester, and 
turned his mind to official and parliamentary business. 
It is written that the ingenious person who undertook 
to instruct Easselas,° prince of Abyssinia, in the art of 20 
flying, ascended an eminence, waved his wings, sprang 
into the air, and instantly dropped into the lake. But 
it is added that the wings, which were unable to sup- 
port him through the sky, bore him up effectually as 
soon as he was in the water. This is no bad type of 



22 ADDISON 

the fate of Charles Montague, and of men like him. 
When he attempted to soar into the regions of poetical 
invention, he altogether failed ; but, as soon as he had 
descended from that ethereal elevation into a lower 
and grosser element, his talents instantly raised him 
above the mass. He became a distinguished financier, 
debater, courtier, and party leader. He still retained 
his fondness for the pursuits of his early days ; but 
he showed that fondness not by wearying the public 

10 with his own feeble performances, but by discovering 
and encouraging literary excellence in others. A 
crowd of wits and poets, who would easily have van- 
quished him as a competitor, revered him as a judge 
and a patron. In his plans for the encouragement of 
learning, he was cordially supported by the ablest and 
most virtuous of his colleagues. Lord Chancellor Som- 
ers.° Though both these great statesmen had a sincere 
love of letters, it was not solely from a love of letters 
that they were desirous to enlist youths of high intel- 

20 lectual qualifications in the public service. The Rev- 
olution had altered the whole system of government. 
Before that event the press had been controlled by 
censors, and the Parliament had sat only two months 
in eight years. Now the press was free, and had 
begun to exercise unprecedented influence on the pub- 



ADDISON 23 

lie mind. Parliament met annually and sat long. The 
chief power in the State had passed to the House of 
Commons. At such a conjuncture, it was natural that 
literary and oratorical talents should rise in value. 
There was danger that a government which neglected 
such talents might be subverted by them. It was, 
therefore, a profound and enlightened policy which 
led Montague and Somers to attach such talents to the 
Whig party, by the strongest ties both of interest and 
of gratitude. jo 

It is remarkable that in a neighboring country, we 
have recently seen similar effects follow from similar 
causes. The revolution of July, 1830, established 
representative government in France. The men of 
letters instantly rose to the highest importance in the 
State. At the present moment most of the persons 
whom we see at the head both of the Administration 
and of the Opposition, have been Professors, His- 
torians, Journalists, Poets. The influence of the 
literary class in England, during the generations 20 
which followed the Revolution, was great, but by no 
means so great as it has lately been in France. For, 
in England, the aristocracy of intellect had to contend 
with a powerful and deeply rooted aristocracy of a 
very different kind. France had no Somersets and 



24 ADDISON 

Slirewsbiii'ies to keep down her Addisons and Priors.° 
It was in the year 1699, when Addison had just 
completed his twenty-seventh year, that the course of 
his life was finally determined. Both the great chiefs ° 
of the Ministry were kindly disposed towards him. In 
political opinions he already was what he continued to 
be through life, a firm, though a moderate Whig. He 
had addressed the most polished and vigorous of his 
early English lines to Somers, and had dedicated to 

10 Montague a Latin poem, truly Virgilian, both in style 
and rhythm, on the peace of E,yswick.° The wish of 
the young poet's great friends was, it should seem, to 
employ him in the service of the crown abroad. But 
an intimate knowledge of the French language was a 
qualification indispensable to a dij)lomatist ; and this 
qualification Addison had not acquired. It was, there- 
fore, thought desirable that he should pass some time 
on the Continent in preparing himself for official em- 
ployment. His own means were not such as would 

20 enable him to travel: but a pension of three hundred 
pounds a year was procured for him by the interest 
of the Lord Chancellor. It seems to have been 
apprehended that some difficulty might be started 
by the rulers of Magdalene College. But the Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer wrote in the strongest terms 



ADDISON 25 

to Hough. The State — such was the purport of 
Montague's letter — could not, at that time, spare to 
the Church such a man as Addison. Too many high 
civil posts Avere already occupied by adventurers, 
who, destitute of every liberal art and sentiment, at 
once pillaged and disgraced the country which they 
pretended to serve. It had become necessary to 
recruit for the public service from a very different 
class, from that class of which Addison was the repre- 
sentative. The close of the Minister's letter was lo 
remarkable. "I am called," he said, "an enemy of 
the Church. But I will never do it any other injury 
than keeping Mr. Addison out of it." 

This interference was successful ; and, in the sum- 
mer of 1699, Addison, made a rich man by his pension, 
and still retaining his fellowship, quitted his beloved 
Oxford, and set out on his travels. He crossed from 
Dover to Calais, proceeded to Paris, and was received 
there with great kindness and politeness by a kinsman 
of his friend Montague, Charles Earl of Manchester, 20 
who had just been appointed Ambassador to the Court 
of France. The Countess, a Whig and a toast,° was 
probably as gracious as her lord; for Addison long 
retained an agreeable recollection of the impression 
which she at this time made on him, and, in some 



26 ADDISON 

lively lines written on the glasses of the Kit Cat Club,° 
described the envy which her cheeks, glowing with 
the genuine bloom of England, had excited among the 
painted beauties of Versailles. 

Lewis the Fourteenth was at this time expiating the 
vices of his youth by a devotion which had no root in 
reason, and bore no fruit of charity. The servile 
literature of France had changed its character to suit 
the changed character of the prince. ISlo book ap- 

10 peared that had not an air of sanctity. Eacine,° who 
was just dead, had passed the close of his life in 
writing sacred dramas ; and Dacier ° was seeking for 
the Athanasian mysteries in Plato. Addison de- 
scribed this state of things in a short but lively and 
graceful letter to Montague. Another letter, written 
about the same time to the Lord Chancellor, conveyed 
the strongest assurances of gratitude and attachment. 
" The only return I can make to your Lordship," said 
Addison, "will be to apply myself entirely to my 

20 business." With this view he quitted Paris and 
repaired to Blois,° a place where it was supposed 
that the French language was spoken in its highest 
purity, and where not a single Englishman could be 
found. Here he passed some months pleasantly and 
profitably. Of his way of life at Blois, one of his 



ADDISON 27 

associates, an Abbe named Pliilippeaux, gave an 
account to Joseph Spence.° If this account is to be 
trusted, Addison studied much, mused much, talked 
little, had fits of absence, and either had no love 
affairs, or was too discreet to confide them to the 
Abbe. A man who, even when surrounded by fellow- 
countrymen and fellow -students, had always been 
remarkably shy and silent, was not likely to be 
loquacious in a foreign tongue, and among foreign 
companions. But it is clear from Addison's letters, lo 
some of which were long after published in the 
Guardian," that, while he appeared to be absorbed 
in his own meditations, he was really observing 
French society with that keen and sly, yet not ill- 
natured side glance, which was peculiarly his own. 
From Blois he returned to Paris ; and, having noAV 
mastered the French language, found great pleasure 
in the society of French philosophers and poets. 
He gave an account, in a letter to Bishop Hough, 
of two highly interesting conversations, one with 20 
Malbranche,° the other with Boileau.° Malbranche 
expressed great partiality for the English, and ex- 
tolled the genius of Newton," but shook his head when 
Hobbes ° was mentioned, and was indeed so unjust 
as to call the author of the Leviathan a poor silly 



28 ADDISON 

creature. Addison's modesty restrained him from 
fully relating, in his letter, the circumstances of his 
introduction to Boileau. Boileau, having survived the 
friends and rivals of his youth, old, deaf, and melan- 
choly, lived in retirement, seldom went either to Court 
or to the Academy,° and was almost inaccessible to 
strangers. Of the English, and of English literature 
he knew nothing. He had hardly heard the name of 
Dry den. Some of oar countrymen, in the warmth of 

10 their patriotism, have asserted that this ignorance must 
have been affected. We own that we see no ground 
for such a supposition. English literature was to the 
French of the age of Lewis the Fourteenth what 
German literature was to our own grandfathers. 
Very few, we suspect, of the accomplished men who, 
sixty or seventy years ago, used to dine in Leicester 
Square with Sir Joshua,° or at Streatham with Mrs. 
Thrale,° had the slightest notion that Wieland° was 
one of the first wits and poets, and Lessing,° beyond 

20 all dispute, the first critic in Europe. Boileau knew 
just as little about the Paradise Lost, and about 
Absalom and Ahitophel ° ; but he had read Addison's 
Latin poems, and admired them greatly. They had 
given him, he said, quite a new notion of the state of 
learning and taste among the English. Johnson will 



ADDISON 29 

have it that these i:)raises were msincere. " Nothing," 
says he, " is better known of Boileau than that he had 
an injudicious and peevish contempt of modern Latin ; 
and therefore his profession of regard was probably 
the effect of his civility rather than approbation." 
Now, nothing is better known of Boileau, than that he 
was singularly sparing of compliments. We do not 
remember that either friendship or fear ever induced 
him to bestow praise on any composition which he did 
not approve. On literary questions, his caustic, dis- lo 
dainful, and self-confident spirit rebelled against that 
authority to which everything else in France bowed 
down. He had the spirit to tell Lewis the Fourteenth 
firmly and even rudely, that his Majesty knew nothing 
about poetry, and admired verses which were detesta- 
ble. What was there in Addison's position that could 
induce the satirist, whose stern and fastidious temper 
had been the dread of two generations, to turn syco- 
phant for the first and last time ? Nor was Boileau's 
contempt of modern Latin either injudicious or peevish. 20 
He thought, indeed, that no poem of the first order 
would ever be written in a dead language. And did 
he think amiss ? Has not the experience of centuries 
confirmed his opinion ? Boileau also thought it prob- 
able that, in the best modern Latin, a writer of the 



30 ADDISON 

Augustan age would have detected ludicrous improprie- 
ties. Aud who can think otherwise ? What modern 
scholar can honestly declare that he sees the smallest 
impurity in the style of Livy ? Yet is it not certain 
that, in the style of Livy, Pollio,° whose taste had 
been formed on the banks of the Tiber, detected the 
inelegant idiom of the Po ? Has any modern scholar 
understood Latin better than Frederic the Great 
understood French? Yet is it not notorious that 

10 Frederic the Great, after reading, speaking, writing 
French, and nothing but French, during more than 
half a century, after unlearning his mother tongue 
in order to learn French, after living familiarly during 
many years with French associates, could not, to the 
last, compose in French, without imminent risk of 
committing some mistake which would have moved 
a smile in the literary circles of Paris ? Do we 
believe that Erasmus ° and Fracastorius ° wrote Latin 
as well as Dr. Eobertson ° and Sir Walter Scott wrote 

20 English ? And are there not in the Dissertation on 
India, the last of Dr. Eobertson's Works, in Waverley, 
in Marmion, Scotticisms at which a London apprentice 
would laugh? But does it follow, because we think 
thus, that we can find nothing to admire in the noble 
alcaics of Gray,° or in the playful elegiacs of Vincent 



ADDISON 31 

Bourne °? Surely not. Nor was Boileau so ignorant 
or tasteless as to be incapable of appreciating good 
modern Latin. In the very letter to which Johnson 
alludes, Boileau says — " ISTe croyez pas pourtant que 
je veuille par la blaraer les vers Latins que vous 
m'avez envoyes d'un de vos illustres academiciens. 
Je les ai trouves fort beaux, et dignes de Vida et de 
Sannazar, mais non pas d'Horace et de Virgile."° 
Several poems, in modern Latin, have been praised 
by Boileau quite as liberally as it was his habit to lo 
praise anything. He says, for example, of the Pere 
Fraguier's ° epigrams, that Catullus seems to have come 
to life again. But the best proof that Boileau did 
not feel the undiscerning contempt for modern Latin 
verses, which has been imputed to him, is, that he 
wrote and published Latin verses in several metres. 
Indeed it happens, curiously enough, that the most 
severe censure ever pronounced by him on modern 
Latin is conveyed in Latin hexameters. We allude 
to the fragment which begins — 20 

* Quid numeris iterum me balbutire Latinis, 
Longe Alpes citra natum de patre Sicambro, 
Musa, jiibes ? ' ° 

For these reasons we feel assured that the praise 
which Boileau bestowed on the Machinoe Gesticulantes° 



32 ADDISON 

and the Gerano-PygmcBoynacliia, was sincere. He 
certainly opened himself to Addison with a freedom 
which was a sure indication of esteem. Literature was 
the chief subject of conversation. The old man talked 
on his favorite theme much and well, indeed, as his 
young hearer thought, incomparably well. Boileau 
had undoubtedly some of the qualities of a great critic. 
He wanted imagination ; but he had strong sense. His 
literary code was formed on narrow principles ; but in 

10 applying it, he showed great judgment and penetration. 
In mere style, abstracted from the ideas of which style 
is the garb, his taste was excellent. He was well 
acquainted with the great Greek writers ; and, though 
unable fully to appreciate their creative genius, ad- 
mired the majestic simplicity of their manner, and had 
learned from them to despise bombast and tinsel. It 
is easy, we think, to discover in the Spectator ° and 
the Guardian, traces of the influence, in part salutary 
and in part pernicious, which the mind of Boileau had 

20 on the mind of Addison. 

While Addison was at Paris, an event took place 
which made that capital a disagreeable residence for 
an Englishman and a Whig. Charles, second of the 
name, King of Spain, died ; and bequeathed his domin- 
ions to Philip, Duke of Anjou, a younger son of the 



ADDISON- 33 

Dauphin.° The King of France, in direct violation of 
his engagements, both with Great Britain and with 
the States-General,° accepted the bequest on behalf of 
his grandson. The house of Bourbon was at the sum- 
mit of human grandeur. England had been outwitted, 
and found herself in a situation at once degrading and 
perilous. The people of France, not presaging the 
calamities by which they were destined to expiate the 
perfidy of their sovereign, went mad with pride and 
delight. Every man looked as if a great estate had lo 
just been left him. " The French conversation," says 
Addison, " begins to grow insupportable ; that which 
was before the vainest nation in the world is now worse 
than ever." Sick of the arrogant exultation of the 
Parisians, and probably foreseeing that the peace be- 
tween France and England could not be of long dura- 
tion, he set off for Italy. 

In December, 1700,^ he embarked at Marseilles. As 
he glided along the Ligurian coast, he was delighted 
by the sight of myrtles and olive trees, which retained 20 

lit is strange that Addison should, in the first line of his travels, 
have misdated his departure from Marseilles by a whole year, and 
still more strange that this slip of the pen, which throws the whole 
narrative into inextricable confusion, should have been repeated in 
a succession of editions, and never detected by Tickell or by Hurd. 

D 



34 ADDISON 

their verdure under the winter solstice. Soon, how- 
ever, he encountered one of the black storms of the 
Mediterranean. The captain of the ship gave up all 
for lost, and confessed himself to a capuchin Avho hap- 
pened to be on board. The English heretic, in the 
mean time, fortified himself against the terrors of death 
with devotions of a very different kind. How strong 
an impression this perilous voyage made on him, ap- 
pears from the ode,° '' How are thy servants blest, 

10 Lord 1 " which was long after published in the Spec- 
tator. After some days of discomfort and danger, 
Addison was glad to land at Savona, and to make his 
way, over mountains where no road had yet been hewn 
out by art, to the city of Genoa. ° 

At Genoa, still ruled by her own Doge, and by the 
nobles whose names were inscribed on her Book of 
Gold,° Addison made a short stay. He admired the 
narrow streets overhung by long lines of towering pal- 
aces, the walls rich with frescoes, the gorgeous temple 

20 of the Annunciation, and the tapestries whereon were 
recorded the long glories of the house of Doria. Thence 
he hastened to Milan, where he contemplated the 
Gothic magnificence of the cathedral with more wonder 
than pleasure. He passed Lake Benacus ° while a gale 
was blowing, and saw the waves raging as they raged 



ADDISON 35 

when Virgil looked upon them. At Venice, then the 
gayest spot in Europe, the traveller spent the Carnival, 
the gayest season of the year, in the midst of masques, 
dances, and serenades. Here he was at once diverted 
and provoked by the absurd dramatic pieces which 
then disgraced the Italian stage. To one of those 
pieces, however, he was indebted for a valuable hint. 
He was present when a ridiculous play on the death 
of Cato was performed. Cato, it seems, was in love 
with a daughter of Scipio. The lady had given her lo 
heart to Caesar. The rejected lover determined to de- 
stroy himself. He appeared seated in his library, a 
dagger in his hand, a Plutarch and a Tasso ° before 
him ; and, in this position, he pronounced a soliloquy 
before he struck the blow. We are surprised that so 
remarkable a circumstance as this should have escaped 
the notice of all Addison's biographers. There cannot, 
we conceive, be the smallest doubt that this scene, in 
spite of its absurdities and anachronisms, struck the 
traveller's imagination, and suggested to him the 20 
thought of bringing Cato on the English stage. It is 
well known that about this time he began his tragedy, 
and that he finished the first four acts before he re- 
turned to England. 

On his way from Venice to Eome, he was drawn 



36 ADDISON 

some miles out of the beaten road by a wish to see 
the smallest independent state in Europe. On a rock 
where the snow still lay, though the Italian spring 
was now far advanced, was perched the little fortress 
of San Marino. ° The roads which led to the secluded 
town were so bad that few travellers had ever visited 
it, and none had ever published an account of it. 
Addison could not suppress a good-natured smile at 
the simple manners and institutions of this singular 

10 community. But he observed with the exultation of 
a Whig, that the rude mountain tract which formed 
the territory of the republic swarmed with an honest, 
healthy, and contented peasantry, while the rich plain 
which surrounded the metropolis of civil and spiritual 
tyranny was scarcely less desolate than the uncleared 
wilds of America. 

At Kome Addison remained on his first visit only 
long enough to catch a glimpse of St. Peter's ° and of 
the Pantheon.° His haste is the more extraordinary 

20 because the Holy Week ° was close at hand. He has 
given no hint which can enable us to pronounce why 
he chose to fly from a spectacle which every year 
allures from distant regions persons of far less taste 
and sensibility than his. Possibly, travelling, as he 
did, at the charge of a Government distinguished by 



ADDISON 37 

its enmity to the Church of Eome, he may have 
thought that it would be imprudent in him to assist 
at the most magnificent rite of that Church. Many 
eyes would be upon him ; and he might find it difficult 
to behave in such a manner as to give offence neither 
to his patrons in England, nor to those among whom 
he resided. Whatever his motives may have been, he 
turned his back on the most august and affecting cere- 
mony which is known among men, and posted along 
the Appian way to Naples. lo 

Naples was then destitute of what are now, perhaps, 
its chief attractions. The lovely bay and the awful 
mountain Avere indeed there. But a farmhouse stood on 
the theatre of Herculaneum, and rows of vines grew over 
the streets of Pompeii. The temples of Psestum ° had 
not indeed been hidden from the eye of man by any 
great convulsion of nature ; but, strange to say, their 
existence was a secret even to artists and antiquaries. 
Though situated within a few hours' journey of a 
great capital, where Salvator° had not long before 20 
painted, and where Vico° was then lecturing, those 
noble remains were as little known to Europe as the 
ruined cities overgrown by the forests of Yucatan. 
What Avas to be seen at Naples, Addison saw. He 
climbed Vesuvius, explored the tunnel of Posilipo,° 



38 ADDISON 

and wandered among the vines and almond trees of 
Capreae.° But neither the wonders of nature, nor 
those of art, could so occupy his attention as to pre- 
vent him from noticing, though cursorily, the abuses 
of the government and the misery of the people. The 
great kingdom which had just descended to Philip the 
Fifth,° was in a state of paralytic dotage. Even Castile 
and Aragon were sunk in wretchedness. Yet, com- 
pared with the Italian dependencies of the Spanish 

10 crown, Castile and Aragon might be called prosperous. 
It is clear that all the observations which Addison 
made in Italy tended to confirm him in the political 
opinions which he had adopted at home. To the last, 
he always spoke of foreign travel as the best cure for 
Jacobitism.° In his Freeholder," the Tory fox-hunter ° 
asks what travelling is good for, except to teach a 
man to jabber French, and to talk against passive 
obedience. 

From Naples, Addison returned to Eome by sea, 

20 along the coast which his favorite Virgil had cele- 
brated. The felucca passed the headland where the 
oar and trumpet were placed by the Trojan advent- 
urers on the tomb of Misenus,° and anchored at night 
under the shelter of the fabled promontory of Circe. 
The voyage ended in the Tiber, still overhung with 



ADDISON 39 

dark verdure, and still turbid with yellow sand, as 
when it met the eyes of ^neas. From the ruined 
port of Ostia, the stranger hurried to Eome ; and at 
Eome he remained during those hot and sickly months ° 
when, even in the Augustan age, all who could make 
their escape fled from mad dogs and from streets black 
with funerals, to gather the first figs of the season in 
the country. It is probable that, when he, long after, 
poured forth in verse his gratitude to the Providence 
which had enabled him to breathe unhurt in tainted lo 
air, he was thinking of the August and September 
which he had passed at Rome. 

It was not till the latter end of October that he tore 
himself away from the masterpieces of ancient and 
modern art which are collected in the city so long 
the mistress of the world. He then journeyed north- 
ward, passed through Sienna, and for a moment forgot 
his prejudices in favor of classic architecture as he 
looked on the magnificent cathedral. At Florence he 
spent some days with the Duke of Shrewsbury," who, 20 
cloyed with the pleasures of ambition, and impatient 
of its pains, fearing both parties, and loving neither, 
had determined to hide in an Italian retreat talents 
and accomplishments which, if they had been united 
with fixed principles and civil courage, might have 



4'J ADDISON 

made him the foremost man of his age. These days, 
we are told, passed pleasantly; and we can easily 
believe it. For Addison was a delightful companion 
when he was at his ease ; and the Duke, though he 
seldom forgot that he was a Talbot, had the invaluable 
art of putting at ease all who came near him. 

Addison gave some time to Florence, and especially 
to the sculptures in the Museum,° which he preferred 
even to those of the Vatican. ° He then pursued his 

10 journey through a country in which the ravages of the 
last war were still discernible, and in which all men 
were looking forward with a dread to a still fiercer 
conflict." Eugene ° had already descended from the 
Khgetian Alps, to dispute with Catinat the rich plain 
of Lombardy. The faithless ruler of Savoy ° was still 
reckoned among the allies of Lewis. England had 
not yet actually declared war against France; but 
Manchester had left Paris ; and the negotiations 
which produced the Grand Alliance ° against the 

20 House of Bourbon were in progress. Under such 
circumstances, it was desirable for an English travel- 
ler to reach neutral ground without delay. Addison 
resolved to cross Mont Cenis.° It was December; 
and the road was very different from that which now 
reminds the stranger of the power and genius of 



ADDISON 41 

Napoleon. The winter, however, was mild; and 
the passage was, for those times, easy. To this 
journey Addison alluded when, in the ode which 
we have already quoted, he said that for him the 
Divine goodness had warmed the hoary Alpine hills. 

It was in the midst of the eternal snow that he 
composed his Epistle to his friend Montague, now 
Lord Halifax. That Epistle, once widely renowned, 
is now known only to curious readers, and will hardly 
be considered by those to whom it is known as in any lo 
perceptible degree heightening Addison's fame. It is, 
however, decidedly superior to any English composi- 
tion which he had previously published. Nay, we think 
it quite as good as any poem in heroic metre which 
appeared during the interval between the death of 
Dryden and the publication of the Essay on Criti- 
cism. It contains passages as good as the second- 
rate passages of Pope, and would have added to the 
reputation of Parnell or Prior. 

But, whatever be the literary merits or defects of 20 
the Epistle, it undoubtedly does honor to the prin- 
ciples and spirit of the author. Halifax had now 
nothing to give. He had fallen from power, had 
been held up to obloquy, had been impeached by the 
House of Commons, and, though his Peers had 



42 ADDISON 

dismissed the impeachment, had, as it seemed, little 
chance of ever again filling high office. The Epistle, 
written at such a time, is one among many proofs 
that there was no mixture of cowardice or meanness 
in the suavity and moderation which distinguished 
Addison from all the other public men of those 
stormy times. 

At Geneva, the traveller learned that a partial 
change of ministry had taken place in England, and 
that the Earl of Manchester had become Secretary of 
State. Manchester exerted himself to serve his young 
friend. It was thought advisable that an English 
agent should be near the person of Eugene in Italy ; 
and Addison, whose diplomatic education was now 
finished, was the man selected. He was preparing 
to enter on his honorable functions, when all his 
prospects were for a time darkened by the death of 
William the Third. 

Anne had long felt a strong aversion, personal, 
political, and religious, to the Whig party. That 
aversion aj^peared in the first measures of her reign. 
Manchester was deprived of the seals, after he had 
held them only a few weeks. Neither Somers nor 
Halifax was sworn of the Privy Council. Addison 
shared the fate of his three patrons. His hopes of 



ADDISON 43 

employment in the public service were at an end; 
his pension was stopped; and it was necessary for 
him to support himself by his own exertions. He 
became tutor to a young English traveller, and 
appears to have rambled with his pupil over a great 
part of Switzerland and Germany. At this time he 
wrote his pleasing treatise on Medals. It was not 
published till after his death; but several distin- 
guished scholars saw the manuscript, and gave just 
praise to the grace of the style, and to the learning lo 
and ingenuity evinced by the quotations. 

From Germany Addison repaired to Holland, where 
he learned the melancholy news of his father's death. 
After passing some months in the United Provinces, 
he returned about the close of the year 1703 to Eng- 
land. He was there cordially received by his friends, 
and introduced by them into the Kit Cat Club, a 
society in which were collected all the various talents 
and accomplishments which then gave lustre to the 
Whig party. 20 

Addison was, during some months after his return 
from the Continent, hard pressed by pecuniary diffi- 
culties. But it was soon in the power of his noble 
patrons to serve him effectually. A political change, 
silent and gradual, but of the highest importance, was 



44 ADDISON 

in daily progress. The accession of Anne had been 
hailed by the Tories with transports of joy and hope ; 
and for a time it seemed that the Whigs had fallen 
never to rise again. The throne was surrounded by 
men supposed to be attached to the prerogative and 
to the Church; and among these none stood so high in 
the favor of the sovereign as the Lord Treasurer 
Godolphin° and the Captain General Marlborough.° 
The country gentlemen and the country clergymen 

10 had fully expected that the policy of these ministers 
would be directly opposed to that which had been 
almost constantly followed by William; that the 
landed interest would be favored at the expense of 
trade ; that no addition would be made to the funded 
debt ; that the privileges conceded to Dissenters ° by 
the late King would be curtailed, if not withdrawn ; 
that the war with France, if there must be such a war, 
would, on our part, be almost entirely naval; and 
that the Government would avoid close connections 

20 with foreign powers, and, above all, with Holland. 

But the country gentlemen and country clergymen 
were fated to be deceived, not for the last time. The 
prejudices and passions which raged without control 
in the vicarages, in cathedral closes, and in the manor- 
houses of fox-hunting squires, were not shared by the 



ADDISON 45 

chiefs of the ministry. Those statesmen saw that it 
was both for the public interest and for their own 
interest, to adopt a Whig policy at least as respected 
the alliances of the country and the conduct of the 
war. But, if the foreign policy of the Whigs were 
adopted, it was impossible to abstain from adopting 
also their financial policy. The natural consequences 
followed. The rigid Tories were alienated from the 
Government. The votes of the Whigs became neces- 
sary to it. The votes of the Whigs could be secured lo 
only by further concessions ; and further concessions 
the Queen was induced to make. 

At the beginning of the year 1704, the state of par- 
ties bore a close analogy to the state of parties in 
1826. In 1826, as in 1704, there was a Tory ministry 
divided into two hostile sections. The position of 
Mr. Canning ° and his friends in 1826 corresponded to 
that which Marlborough and Godolphin occupied in 
1704. Nottingham ° and Jersey ° were, in 1704, what 
Lord Eldon ° and Lord Westmoreland ° were in 1826. 20 
The Whigs of 1704 were in a situation resembling 
that in which the Whigs of 1826 stood. In 1704, 
Somers,° Halifax,^ Sunderland,° Cowper,° were not in 
office. There was no avowed coalition between them 
and the moderate Tories. It is probable that no di- 



46 ADDISON 

rect communication tending to such a coalition had 
yet taken place ; yet all men saw that such a coalition 
was inevitable, nay, that it was already half formed. 
Such, or nearly such, was the state of things when 
tidings arrived of the great battle fought at Blenheim "" 
on the 13th August, 1704. By the Whigs the news 
was hailed with transports of joy and pride. No fault, 
no cause of quarrel, could be remembered by them 
against the Commander whose genius had, in one day, 

[o changed the face of Europe, saved the Imperial throne, 
humbled the House of Bourbon, and secured the Act 
of Settlement ° against foreign hostility. The feeling 
of the Tories was very different. They could not in- 
deed, without impudence, openly express regret at an 
event so glorious to their country ; but their congratu- 
lations were so cold and sullen as to give deep disgust 
to the victorious general and his friends. 

Godolphin was not a reading man. Whatever time 
he could spare from business he Avas in the habit of 

!o spending at Newmarket ° or at the card table. But he 
was not absolutely indifferent to poetry ; and he was 
too intelligent an observer not to perceive that litera- 
ture was a formidable engine of political warfare, and 
that the great Whig leaders had strengthened their 
party, and raised their character, by extending a lib- 



ADDISON 47 

eral and judicious patronage to good writers. He was 
mortified, and not without reason, by tlie exceeding 
badness of tlie poems whicli appeared in honor of the 
battle of Blenheim. One of these poems has been 
rescued from oblivion by the exquisite absurdity of 
three lines. 

" Think of two thousand gentlemen at least, 
And each man mounted on his capering beast ; 
Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals." 

Where to procure better verses the Treasurer did lo 
not know. He understood how to negotiate a loan, 
or remit a subsidy: he was also well versed in the 
history of running horses and fighting cocks ; but his 
acquaintance among the poets was very small. He 
consulted Halifax ; but Halifax affected to decline the 
office of adviser. He had, he said, done his best, 
when he iiad power, to encourage men whose abilities 
and acquirements might do honor to their country. 
Those times were over. Other maxims had prevailed. 
Merit was suffered to pine in obscurity ; and the public 20 
money was squandered on the undeserving. "I do 
know," he added, " a gentleman who would celebrate 
the battle in a manner worthy of the subject ; bnt 
I will not name him." Godolphin, who was expert at 



48 ADDISON 

the soft answer which, turneth away wrath, and who 
was under the necessity of paying court to the Whigs, 
gently replied that there was too much ground for 
Halifax's complaints, but that what was amiss should 
in time be rectified, and that in the mean time 
the services of a man such as Halifax had described 
should be liberally rewarded. Halifax then mentioned 
Addison, but, mindful of the dignity as well as of the 
pecuniary interest of his friend, insisted that the 

10 Minister should apply in the most courteous manner to 
Addison himself; and this Godolx3hin promised to do. 
Addison then occupied a garret up three pair of 
stairs, over a small shop in the Haymarket. In this 
humble lodging he was surprised, on the morning 
which followed the conversation between Godolphin 
and Halifax, by a visit from no less a person than 
the Eight Honorable Henry Boyle, then Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, and afterwards Lord Carleton. 
This high-born minister had been sent by the Lord 

20 Treasurer as ambassador to the needy poet. Addison 
readily undertook the proposed task, a task which, to 
so good a Whig, was probably a pleasure. When the 
poem was little more than half finished, he showed 
it to Godolphin, who was delighted with it, and par- 
ticularly with the famous similitude of the Angel. ° 



ADDISON 49 

Addison was instantly appointed to a Commissioner- 
ship worth about two hundred pounds a year, and 
was assured that this appointment was only an earnest 
of greater favors. 

The Campaign came forth, and was as much admired 
by the public as by the Minister. It pleases us less 
on the whole than the Epistle to Halifax. Yet it un- 
doubtedly ranks high among the poems which appeared 
during the interval between the death of Dryden and 
the dawn of Pope's genius. The chief merit of the lo 
Campaign, we think, is that which was noticed by John- 
son, the manly and rational rejection of fiction. The 
first great poet whose works have come down to us 
sang of war long before war became a science or a 
trade. If, in his time, there was enmity between two 
little Greek towns, each poured forth its crowd of cit- 
izens, ignorant of discipline, and armed with imple- 
ments of labor rudely turned into weapons. On each 
side appeared conspicuous a few chiefs, whose wealth 
had enabled them to procure good armor, horses, and 20 
chariots, whose leisure had enabled them to practise 
military exercises. One such chief, if he were a man 
of great strength, agility, and courage, would prob- 
ably be more formidable than twenty common men ; 
and the force and dexterity with which he flung 



50 ADDISON 

his spear might have no inconsiderable share in 
deciding the event of the day. Such were probably 
the battles with which Homer was familiar. But 
Homer related the actions of men of a former 
generation, of men who sprang from the Gods, and 
communed with the Gods face to face, of men, one 
of whom could with ease hurl rocks which two sturdy 
hinds of a later period would be unable even to lift. 
He therefore naturally represented their martial ex- 

loploits as resembling in kind, but far surpassing in 
magnitude, those of the stoutest and most expert com- 
batants of his own age. Achilles, clad in celestial 
armor, drawn by celestial coursers, grasping the spear 
which none but himself could raise, driving all Troy 
and Lycia before him, and choking Scamander with 
dead, was only a magnificent exaggeration of the real 
hero, who, strong, fearless, accustomed to the use of 
weapons, guarded by a shield and helmet of the best 
Sidonian fabric and whirled along by horses of Thes- 

20 salian breed, struck down with his own right arm foe 
after foe. In all rude societies similar notions are 
found. There are at this day countries where the Life- 
guardsman Shaw ° would be considered as a much 
greater warrior than the Duke of Wellington. Bona- 
parte loved to describe the astonishment with which 



ADDISON 51 

the Mamelukes ° looked at his diminutive figure. 
Mourad Bey, distinguished above all his fellows by 
his bodily strength, and by the skill with which he 
managed his horse and his sabre, could not believe 
that a man who was scarcely five feet high, and rode 
like a butcher, could be the greatest soldier in Europe. 
Homer's description of war had therefore as much 
truth as poetry requires. But truth was altogether 
wanting to the performances of those who, writing 
about battles which had scarcely anything in common lo 
with the battles of his times, servilely imitated his 
manner. The folly of Silius Italicus, in particular, is 
positively nauseous. He undertook to record in verse 
the vicissitudes of a great struggle between generals 
of the first order : and his narrative is made up of the 
hideous wounds which these generals inflicted with 
their own hands. Asdrubal ° flings a spear which 
grazes the shoulder of the consul Nero; but Nero 
sends his spear into Asdrubal's side. Fabius slays 
Thuris and Butes and Maris and Arses, and the 20 
long-haired Adherbes, and the gigantic Thy lis, and 
Sapharus and Monaesus, and the trumpeter Morinus. 
Hannibal runs Perusinus through the groin with a 
stake, and breaks the backbone of Telesinus with a 
huge stone. This detestable fashion was copied in 



52 ADDISON 

modern times, and continued to prevail down to the 
age of Addison. Several versifiers had described 
William turning thousands to flight by his single 
prowess, and dyeing the Boyne° with Irish blood. 
Nay, so estimable a writer as John Philips," the 
author of the Splendid Shilling," represented Marl- 
borough as having won the battle of Blenheim merely 
by strength of muscle and skill in fence. The follow- 
ing lines may serve as an example : 

, " Churchill, viewing where 

The violence of Tallard° most prevailed, 
Came to oppose his slaughtering arm. With speed 
Precipitate he rode, urging his way 
O'er hills of gasping heroes, and fallen steeds 
Rolling in death. Destruction, grim w^ith blood, 
Attends his furious course. Around his head 
The glowing balls play innocent, while he 
With dire impetuous sway deals fatal blows 
Among the flying Gauls. In Gallic blood 

3 He dyes his reeking sword, and strews the ground 

With headless ranks. AVhat can they do ? Or how 
Withstand his wide-destroying sword ? " 

Addison, with excellent sense and taste, departed 
from this ridiculous fashion. He reserved his praise 
for the qualities which made Marlborough truly great, 
energy, sagacity, military science. But, above all, the 



ADDISON 53 

poet extolled the firmness of that mind which, in the 
midst of confusion, uproar, and slaughter, exaniiued 
and disposed everything with the serene wisdom of a 
higher intelligence. 

Here it was that he introduced the famous compari- 
son of Marlborough to an Angel guiding the whirl- 
wind. We will not dispute the general justice of 
Johnson's remarks on this passage. But we must 
point oat one circumstance which appears to have 
escaped all the critics. The extraordinary effect lo 
which the simile produced when it first appeared, 
and which to the following generation seemed inex- 
plicable, is doubtless to be chiefly attributed to a 
line which most readers now regard as a feeble paren- 
thesis, 

" Such as, of late, o'er pale Britannia pass'd." 

Addison spoke, not of a storm, but of the storm. The 
great tempest of November, 1703, the only tempest 
which in our latitude has equalled the rage of a tropi- 
cal hurricane, had left a dreadful recollection in the 20 
minds of all men. No other tempest was ever in this 
country the occasion of a parliamentary address or of 
a public fast. Whole fleets had been cast away. 
Large mansions had been blown down. One Prelate 



54 ADDISON 

had been buried beneath the ruins of his palace. 
London and Bristol had presented the appearance of 
cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were still in 
mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees, and 
the ruins of houses still attested, in all the southern 
counties, the fury of the blast. The popularity which 
the simile of the angel enjoyed among Addison's con- 
temporaries, has always seemed to us to be a remarka- 
ble instance of the advantage which, in rhetoric and 

10 poetry, the particular has over the general. 

Soon after the Campaign, was published Addison's 
narrative of his Travels in Italy. The first effect pro- 
duced by this Narrative was disappointment. The 
crowd of readers who expected politics and scandal, 
speculations on the projects of Victor Amadeus,° and 
anecdotes about the jollities of convents and the 
amours of cardinals and nuns, were confounded by 
finding that the writer's mind was much more occupied 
by the war between the Trojans and Eutulians ° than 

20 by the war between France and Austria ; and that he 
seemed to have heard no scandal of later date than 
the gallantries of the Empress Eaustina.° In time, 
however, the judgment of the many was overruled by 
that of the few, and, before the book was reprinted, 
it was so eagerly sought that it sold for five times the 



ADDISON 55 

original price. It is still read with pleasure: the 
style is pure and flowing ; the classical quotations and 
allusions are numerous and happy; and we are now 
and then charmed by that singularly humane and deli- 
cate humor in which Addison excelled all men. Yet 
this agreeable work, even when considered merely as 
the history of a literary tour, may justly be censured 
on account of its faults of omission. We have already 
said that, though rich in extracts from the Latin poets, 
it contains scarcely any references to the Latin orators lo 
and historians. We must add, that it contains little, 
or rather no information, respecting the history and lit- 
erature of modern Italy. To the best of our remem- 
brance, Addison does not mention Dante,° Petrarch,° 
Boccaccio,° Boiardo,° Berni,° Lorenzo de' Medici,° or 
Machiavelli.° He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he 
saw the tomb of Ariosto,° and that at Venice he heard 
the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso.° But for Tasso 
and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flac- 
cus ° and Sidonius Apollinaris.° The gentle flow of 20 
the Ticin° brings a line of Silius to his mind. The 
sulphurous steam of Albula suggests to him several 
passages of Martial. ° But he has not a word to say 
of the illustrious dead of Santa Croce ° ; he crosses 
the wood of Eavenna without recollecting the Spectre 



56 ADDISON 

Huntsman," and wanders up and down E-imini without 
one thought of Francesca.° At Paris he had eagerly 
sougiit an introduction to Boileau ; but he seems not 
to have been at all aware that at Florence he was in 
the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not 
sustain a comparison, of the greatest lyric poet of 
modern times, Vincenzio Filicaja." This is the most 
remarkable, because Filicaja was the favorite poet of 
the accomplished Somers, under whose protection Ad- 

lo dison travelled, and to whom the account of the Trav- 
els is dedicated. The truth is, that Addison knew 
little and cared less, about the literature of modern 
Italy. His favorite models were Latin. His favorite 
critics were French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he 
had read seemed to him monstrous, and the other half 
tawdry.° 

His Travels were followed by the lively Opera of 
Eosamond.° The piece was ill set to music, and there- 
fore failed on the stage, but it completely succeeded 

20 in print, and is indeed excellent in its kind. The 
smoothness with which the verses glide, and the elas- 
ticity with which they bound, is, to our ears at least, 
very pleasing. We are inclined to think that if Addi- 
son had left heroic couplets to Pope, and blank verse 
to Eowe,° and had employed himself in writing airy 



ADDISON 57 

and spirited songs, his reputation as a poet would have 
stood far higher than it now does. Some years after 
his death, Eosamond was set to new music by Doctor 
Arne°; and was performed with complete success. 
Several passages long retained their popularity, and 
were daily sung, during the latter part of George the 
Second's reign, at all the harpsichords in England. 

While Addison thus amused himself, his prospects, 
and the prospects of his party, were constantly becom- 
ing brighter and brighter. In the spring of 1705 the lo 
ministers were freed from the restraint imposed by a 
House of Commons in which Tories of the most per- 
verse class had the ascendency. The elections were 
favorable to the Whigs. The coalition which had 
been tacitly and gradually formed was now openly 
avowed. The Great Seal was given to Cowper. 
Somers and Halifax were sworn of the Council. Hal- 
ifax was sent in the following year to carry the deco- 
ration of the order of the garter ° of the electoral Prince 
of Hanover,° and was accompanied on this honorable 20 
mission by Addison, who had just been made Under 
Secretary of State. The Secretary of State under 
whom Addison first served was Sir Charles Hedges, a 
Tory. But Hedges was soon dismissed to make room 
for the most vehement of Whigs, Charles, Earl of 



58 ADDISON 

Sunderland. In every department of the state, in- 
deed, the High Churchmen were compelled to give 
place to their opponents. At the close of 1707, the 
Tories who still remained in office strove to rally, with 
Harley ° at their head. But the attempt, though favored 
by the Queen, who had always been a Tory at heart, 
and who had now quarrelled with the Duchess of 
Marlborough," was unsuccessful. The time was not 
yet. The Captain General ° was at the height of popu- 

To larity and glory. The Low Church party had a ma- 
jority in Parliament. The country squires and rectors, 
though occasionally uttering a savage growl, were for 
the most i:)art in a state of torpor, which lasted till 
they were roused into activity, and indeed into mad- 
ness, by the prosecution of Sacheverell.° Harley and 
his adherents were compelled to retire. The victory 
of the Whigs was complete. At the general election 
of 1708, their strength in the House of Commons be- 
came irresistible; and before the end of that year, 

20 Somers was made Lord President of the Council, and 
Wharton ° Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. 

Addison sat for Malmesbury in the House of Com- 
mons which was elected in 1708. But the House of 
Commons was not the field for him. The bashfulness 
of his nature made his wit and eloquence useless in 



ADDISON 59 

debate. He once rose, but could not overcome his 
diffidence, and ever after remained silent. Nobody 
can think it strange that a great writer should fail as 
a speaker. But many, probably, will think it strange 
that Addison's failure as a speaker should have had 
no unfavorable effect on his success as a politician. 
In our time, a man of high rank and great fortune 
might, though speaking very little and very ill, hold a 
considerable post. But it would now be inconceivable 
that a mere adventurer, a man who, when out of office, lo 
must live by his pen, should in a few years become 
successively Under Secretary of State, Chief Secretary 
for Ireland, and Secretary of State, without some 
oratorical talent. Addison, Avithout high birth, and 
with little property, rose to a post which Dukes, the 
heads of the great houses of Talbot,° Eussell,° and 
Bentinck,'^ have thought it an honor to fill. Without 
opening his lips in debate, he rose to a post, the 
highest that Chatham ° or Fox° ever reached. And 
this he did before he had been nine years in Parlia- 20 
ment. We must look for the explanation of this seem- 
ing miracle to the peculiar circumstances in which 
that generation was placed. During the interval which 
elapsed between the time when the Censorship of the 
Press ° ceased, and the time when parliamentary pro- 



60 ADDISON 

ceedings began to be freely reported, literary talents 
were, to a public man, of much more importance, and 
oratorical talents of much less importance, than in our 
time. At present the best way of giving rapid and 
wide publicity to a fact or an argument is to introduce 
that fact or argument into a speech made in Parlia- 
ment. If a political tract were to appear superior to 
the Conduct of the Allies,° or to the best numbers of 
the Freeholder," the circulation of such a tract would 

10 be languid indeed when compared with the circulation 
of every remarkable word uttered in the deliberations 
of the legislature. A speech made in the House of 
Commons at four in the morning is on thirty thousand 
tables before ten. A speech made on the Monday is 
read on the Wednesday by multitudes in Antrim ° and 
Aberdeenshire. ° The orator, by the help of the short- 
hand writer, has to a great extent superseded the 
pamphleteer. It was not so in the reign of Anne. 
The best speech could then produce no effect except 

20 on those who heard it. It was only by means of the 
press that the opinion of the public without doors 
could be influenced; and the opinion of the public 
without doors could not but be of the highest impor- 
tance in a country governed by parliaments, and indeed 
at that time governed by triennial parliaments. The pen 



ADDISON 61 

was therefore a more formidable political engine than 
the tongue. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox contended only in 
Parliament. Bat Walpole ° and Pulteney,° the Pitt 
and Fox of an earlier period, had not done half of what 
was necessary, when they sat down amidst the acclama- 
tions of the House of Commons. They had still to 
plead their cause before the country, and this they 
could only do by means of the press. Their works are 
now forgotten. But it is certain that there were in Grub 
Street ° few more assiduous scribblers of Thoughts, lo 
Letters, Answers, Kemarks, than these two great 
chiefs of parties. Pulteney, when leader of the Oppo- 
sition, and possessed of thirty thousand a year, edited 
the Craftsman." Walpole, though not a man of liter- 
ary habits, was the author of at least ten pamphlets, 
and retouched and corrected many more. These facts 
sufficiently show of how great importance literary 
assistance then was to the contending parties. St. 
John ° was, certainly, in Anne's reign, the best Tor}^ 
speaker ; Cowper was probably the best Whig speaker. 20 
But it may well be doubted whether St. John did so 
much for the Tories as Swift, and whether Cowper did 
so much for the Whigs as Addison. When these 
things are duly considered, it will not be thought 
strange that Addison should have climbed higher in the 



62 ADDISON 

state than any other Englishman has ever, by means 
merely of literary talents, been able to climb. Swift 
would, in all probability, have climbed as high, if he had 
not been encumbered by his cassock and his pudding 
sleeves. As far as the homage of the great went. Swift 
had as much of it as if he had been Lord Treasurer. 

To the influence which Addison derived from his 
literary talents was added all the influence which 
arises from character. The world, always ready to 
think the worst of needy political adventurers, was 
forced to make one exception. Eestlessness, violence, 
audacity, laxity of principle, are the vices ordinarily 
attributed to that class of men. But faction itself 
could not deny that Addison had, through, all changes 
of fortune, been strictly faithful to his early opinions, 
and to his early friends ; that his integrity was with- 
out stain; that his whole deportment indicated a fine 
sense of the becoming; that, in the utmost heat of 
controversy, his zeal was tempered by a regard for 
truth, humanity, and social decorum ; that no outrage 
could ever provoke him to retaliation unworthy of a 
Christian and a gentleman; and that his only faults 
were a too sensitive delicacy, and a modesty which 
amounted to bashfulness. 

He was undoubtedly one of the most popular men of 



ADDISON 63 

his time; and mucli of his popularity he owed, we be- 
lieve, to that very timidity which his friends lamented. 
That timidity often prevented him from exhibiting 
his talents to the best advantage. But it propitiated 
Nemesis. ° It averted that envy which would other- 
wise have been excited by fame so splendid, and by 
so rapid an elevation. No man is so great a favorite 
with the public as he who is at once an object of ad- 
miration, of respect, and of pity ; and such were the 
feelings which Addison inspired. Those who enjoyed lo 
the privilege of hearing his familiar conversation, de- 
clared with one voiee that it was superior even to his 
writings. The 'bTilliant Mary Montague ° said, that 
she had known all the Avits, and that Addison was 
the best company in the world. The malignant Pope 
was forced to own, that there was a charm in Addi- 
son's talk, which could be found nowhere else. Swift, 
when burning with animosity against the Whigs, 
could not but confess to Stella ° that, after all, he 
had never known any associate so agreeable as Addi- 20 
son. Steele, ° an excellent judge of lively conversa- 
tion, said, that the conversation of Addison was at once 
the most polite, and the most mirthful, that could be 
imagined; that it was Terence ° and Catullus in one, 
heightened by an exquisite something which was 



64 ADDISON 

neither Terence nor Catullus, but Addison alone. 
Young,° an excellent judge of serious conversation, 
said, that when Addison was at his ease, he went on 
in a noble strain of thought and language, so as to 
chain the attention of every hearer. Nor were Addi- 
son's great colloquial powers more admirable than the 
courtesy and softness of heart which appeared in his 
conversation. At the same time, it would be too 
much to say that he was wholly devoid of the malice 

10 which is, j)erhaps, inseparable from a keen sense of 
the ludicrous. He had one habit which both Swift 
and Stella applauded, and which we hardly know how 
to blame. If his first attempts to set a presuming 
dunce right were ill received, he changed his tone, 
" assented with civil leer," and lured the flattered cox- 
comb deeper and deeper into absurdity. That such 
was his practice we should, we think, have guessed 
from his works. The Tatler's criticisms on Mr. 
Softly's° sonnet, and the Spectator's dialogue with 

20 the politician who is so zealous for the honor of Lady 
Q — p — t — s, are excellent specimens of this innocent 
mischief. 

Such were Addison's talents for conversation. But 
his rare gifts were not exhibited to crowds or to stran- 
gers. As soon as he entered a large company, as soon 



ADDISON 65 

as he saw an unknown face, his lips were sealed, and 
his manners became constrained. None who met him 
only in great assemblies would have been able to be- 
lieve that he was the same man who had often kept a 
few friends listening and laughing round a table, from 
the time when the play ended, till the clock of St. 
Paul's in Covent Garden ° struck four. Yet, even at 
such a table, he was not seen to the best advantage. 
To enjoy his conversation in the highest perfection, it 
was necessary to be alone with him, and to hear him, lo 
in his own phrase, think aloud. "There is no such 
thing," he used to say, "as real conversation, but 
between two persons." 

This timidity, a timidity surely neither ungraceful 
nor unamiable, led Addison into the two most serious 
faults which can with justice be imputed to him. He 
found that wine broke the spell which lay on his fine 
intellect, and was therefore too easily seduced into 
convivial excess. Such excess was in that age re- 
garded, even by grave men, as the most venial of all 20 
peccadilloes, and was so far from being a mark of ill- 
breeding, that it was almost essential to the character 
of a fine gentleman. But the smallest speck is seen 
on a white ground ; and almost all the biographers of 
Addison have said something about this failing. Of 



66 ADDISON 

any other statesman or writer of Queen Anne's reign, 
we should no more think of saying that he sometimes 
took too much wine, than that he wore a long wig and 
a sword. 

To the excessive modesty of Addison's nature we 
must ascribe another fault which generally arises from 
a very different cause. He became a little too fond of 
seeing himself surrounded by a small circle of admir- 
ers, to whom he was as a King or rather as a God. 

lo All these jnen were far inferior to him in ability, and 
some of them had very serious faults. Nor did those 
faults escape his observation; for, if ever there was 
an eye that saw through and through men, it was the 
eye of Addison. But wdtR. the keenest observation, 
and the finest sense of the ridiculous, he had a large 
charity. The feeling with which he looked on most 
of his humble companions was one of benevolence, 
slightly tinctured with contempt. He was at perfect 
ease in their company ; he was grateful for their de- 

20 voted attachment ; and he loaded them with benefits. 
Their veneration for him appears to have exceeded 
that with which Johnson was regarded by Boswell,° 
or Warburton ° by Hurd.° It was not in the power 
of adulation to turn such a head, or deprave such a 
heart, as Addison's. But it must in candor be ad- 



ADDISON 67 

mitted that he contracted some of the faults which 
can scarcely be avoided by any person who is so un- 
fortunate as to be the oracle of a small literary coterie. 

One member of this little society was Eustace 
Budgell,° a young Templar of some literature, and a 
distant relation of Addison. There was at this time 
no stain on the character of Budgell, and it is not im- 
probable that his career would have been prosperous 
and honorable, if the life of his cousin had been pro- 
longed. But, when the master was laid in the grave, lo 
the disciple broke loose from all restraint, descended 
rapidly from one degree of vice and misery to an- 
other, ruined his fortune by follies, attempted to re- 
pair it by crimes, and at length closed a wicked and 
unhappy life by self-murder. Yet, to the last, the 
wretched man, gambler, lampooner, cheat, forger, as 
he was, retained his affection and veneration for Ad- 
dison, and recorded those feelings in the last lines 
which he traced before he hid himself from infamy 
under London Bridge. 20 

Another of Addison's favorite companions was Am- 
brose Phillipps,° a good Whig and a middling poet, 
who had the honor of bringing into fashion a species 
of composition which has been called, after his name, 
Namby Pamby. But the most remarkable members 



68 ADDISON 

of the little senate, as Pope long afterwards called it, 
were Richard Steele and Thomas Tickell.° 

Steele had known Addison from childhood. They 
had been together at the Charter House and at Ox- 
ford; but circumstances had then, for a time, sepa- 
rated them widely. Steele had left college without 
taking a degree, had been disinherited by a rich rela- 
tion, had led a vagrant life, had served in the army, 
had tried to find the philosopher's stone, and had 

10 written a religious treatise and several comedies. He 
was one of those people whom it is impossible either 
to hate or to respect. His temper was sweet, his 
affections warm, his spirits lively, his passions strong, 
and his principles weak. His life was spent in sin- 
ning and repenting; in inculcating Avhat was right, 
and doing what was wrong. In speculation, he was a 
man of piety and honor ; in practice he was much of 
the rake and a little of the swindler. He was, how- 
ever, so good-natured that it was not easy to be seri- 

20 ously angry with him, and that even rigid moralists 
felt more inclined to pity than to blame him, when he 
diced himself into a spunging house ° or drank himself 
into a fever. Addison regarded Steele with kindness 
not unmingled with scorn, tried, with little success, to 
keep him out of scrapes, introduced him to the great. 



ADDISON 69 

procured a place for him, corrected his plays, and, 
though by no means rich, lent him large sums of 
money. One of these loans appears, from a letter 
dated in August, 1708, to have amounted to a thousand 
pounds. These pecuniary transactions probably led 
to frequent bickerings. It is said that, on one occa- 
sion, Steele's negligence, or dishonesty, provoked Ad- 
dison to repay himself by the help of a bailiff. We 
cannot join with Miss Aikin in rejecting this story. 
Johnson heard it from Savage, who heard it from lo 
Steele. Few private transactions which took place a 
hundred and twenty years ago, are proved by stronger 
evidence than this. But we can by no means agree 
with those who condemn Addison's severity. The 
most amiable of mankind may well be moved to indig- 
nation, when what he has earned hardly, and lent 
with great inconvenience to himself, for the purpose 
of relieving a friend in distress, is squandered with 
insane profusion. We will illustrate onr meaning by 
an example which is not the less striking because it is 20 
taken from fiction. Dr. Harrison, in Fielding's ° Ame- 
lia, is represented as the most benevolent of human 
beings ; yet he takes in execution, not only the goods, 
but the person of his friend Booth. Dr. Harrison 
resorts to this strong measure because he has been 



70 ADDISON 

.informed that Booth, while pleading poverty as an ex- 
cuse for not paying just debts, has been buying fine 
jewelry, and setting up a coach. No person who is 
well acquainted with Steele's life and correspondence 
can doubt that he behaved quite as ill to Addison as 
Booth was accused of behaving to Dr. Harrison. The 
real history, we have little doubt, was something like 
this : — A letter comes to Addison, imploring help in 
pathetic terms, promising reformation and speedy re- 

10 payment. Poor Dick declares that he has not an inch 
of candle, or a bushel of coals, or credit with the 
butcher for a shoulder of mutton. Addison is moved. 
He determines to deny himself some medals which 
are wanting to his series of the Twelve Caesars; to 
put off buying the new edition of Bayle's ° Dictionary ; 
and to wear his old sword and buckles another year. 
In this way he manages to send a hundred pounds to 
his friend. The next day he calls on Steele, and finds 
scores of gentlemen and ladies assembled. The fiddles 

20 are playing. The table is groaning under Champagne, 
Burgundy, and pyramids of sweetmeats. Is it strange 
that a man whose kindness is thus abused, should send 
sheriff's officers to reclaim what is due to him ? 

Tickell was a young man, fresh from Oxford, who 
had introduced himself to public notice by writing 



ADDISON 71 

a most ingenious and graceful little poem in praise 
of the opera of Eosamond. He deserved, and at 
length attained, the first place in Addison's friend- 
ship. For a time Steele and Tickell were on good 
terms. But they loved Addison too much to love 
each other, and at length became as bitter enemies 
as the rival bulls in Virgil. 

At the close of 1708 Wharton became Lord Lieu- 
tenant of Ireland, and appointed Addison Chief 
Secretary. Addison was consequently under the lo 
necessity of quitting London for Dublin. Besides 
the chief secretaryship, which was then worth about 
two thousand pounds a year, he obtained a patent 
appointing him keeper of the Irish Records for life, 
with a salary of three or four hundred a year. 
Budgell accompanied his cousin in the capacity of 
private Secretary. 

Wharton and Addison had nothing in common but 
Whiggism. The Lord Lieutenant was not only licen- 
tious and corrupt, but was distinguished from other 20 
libertines and jobbers by a callous impudence which 
presented the strongest contrast to the Secretary's 
gentleness and delicacy. Many parts of the Irish 
administration at this time appear to have deserved 
serious blame. But against Addison there was not a 



72 ADDISON 

murmur. He long afterwards asserted, what all the 
evidence which we have ever seen tends to prove, that 
his diligence and integrity gained the friendship of 
all the most considerable persons in Ireland. 

The parliamentary career of Addison in Ireland has^ 
we think, wholly escaped the notice of all his biog- 
raphers. He was elected member for the borough of 
Cavan in the summer of 1709 ; and in the journals of 
two sessions his name frequently occurs. Some of the 

lo entries appear to indicate that he so far overcame his 
timidity as to make speeches. Nor is this by any 
means improbable ; for the Irish House of Commons 
was a far less formidable audience than the English 
House ; and many tongues which were tied by fear in 
the greater assembly became fluent in the smaller. 
Gerard Hamilton," for example, who, from fear of 
losing the fame gained by his single speech, sat mute 
at Westminster during forty years, spoke with great 
effect at Dublin when he was Secretary to Lord 

20 Halifax. 

While Addison was in Ireland, an event occurred to 
which he owes his high and permanent rank among 
British writers. As yet his fame rested on perform- 
ances which, though highly respectable, were not 
built for duration, and which would, if he had pro- 



ADDISON 73 

duced nothing else, have now been almost forgotten, 
on some excellent Latin verses, on some English verses 
which occasionally rose above mediocrity, and on a 
book of travels, agreeably written, but not indicating 
any extraordinary powers of mind. These works 
showed him to be a man of taste, sense, and learning. 
The time had come when he was to prove himself a 
man of genius, and to enrich our literature with 
compositions which will live as long as the English 
language. ^ lo 

In the spring of 1709 Steele formed a literary 
project, of which he was far indeed from foreseeing 
the consequences. Periodical papers had during 
many years been published in London. Most of 
these were political ; but in some of them questions 
of morality, taste, and love casuistry had been dis- 
cussed. The literary merit of these works was 
small indeed; and even their names are now known 
only to the curious. 

Steele had been appointed Gazetteer ° by Sunderland, 20 
at the request, it is said, of Addison, and thus had 
access to foreign intelligence earlier and more authen- 
tic than was in those times within the reach of an 
ordinary newswriter. This circumstance seems to 
have suggested to him the scheme of publishing a 



74 ADDISON 

periodical paper on a new plan. It was to appear 
on the days on which the post left London for the 
country, which were, in that generation, the Tuesdays, 
Thursdays and Saturdays. It was to contain the 
foreign news, accounts of theatrical representations, 
and the literary gossip of Will's and of the Grecian. 
It was also to contain remarks on the fashionable 
topics of the day, compliments to beauties, pasquin- 
ades on noted sharpers, and criticisms on popular 

10 preachers. The aim of Steele does not appear to 
have been at first higher than this. He was not ill 
qualified to conduct the work which he had planned. 
His public intelligence he drew from the best sources. 
He knew the town, and had paid dear for his know- 
ledge. He had read much more than the dissipated 
men of that time were in the habit of reading. He 
was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among 
rakes. His style was easy and not incorrect; and, 
though his wit and humor were of no high order, his 

20 gay animal spirits imparted to his compositions an 
air of vivacity which ordinary readers could hardly 
distinguish from common genius. His writings have 
been well compared to those light wines Avhich, though 
deficient in body and flavor, are yet a pleasant small 
drink, if not kept too long, or carried too far. 



ADDISON 75 

Isaac Bickerstaff,° Esquire, Astrologer, was an imag- 
inary person, almost as well known in that age as Mr. 
Paul Pry or Mr. Samuel Pickwick in ours. Swift had 
assumed the name of Bickerstaff in a satirical pam- 
phlet against Partridge, the maker of almanacs. 
Partridge had been fool enough to publish a furious 
reply. Bickerstaff had rejoined in a second pamphlet 
still more diverting than the first. All the wits had 
combined to keep up the joke, and the town was long 
in convulsions of laughter. Steele determined to lo 
employ the name, which this controversy had made 
popular; and, in 1709, it was announced that Isaac 
Bickerstaff, Esquire, Astrologer, was about to publish 
a paper called the Tatler.° 

Addison had not been consulted about this scheme : 
but as soon as he heard of it he determined to give his 
assistance. The effect of that assistance cannot be 
better described than in Steele's own words. "I 
fared," he said, ''like a distressed prince who calls 
in a powerful neighbor to his aid. I was undone by 20 
my auxiliary. When I had once called him in, I 
could not subsist without dependence on him." "The 
paper," he says elsewhere, " was advanced indeed. It 
was raised to a greater thing than I intended it." 

It is probable that Addison, when he sent across St. 



76 ADDISON 

George's Chanuel his first contributions to the Tatler, 
had no notion of the extent and variety of his own 
powers. He was the possessor of a vast mine, rich 
with a hundred ores. But he had been acquainted 
only with the least precious part of his treasures, 
and had hitherto contented himself with producing 
sometimes copper and sometimes lead, intermingled 
with a little silver. All at once, and by mere acci- 
dent, he had lighted on an inexhaustible vein of the 

10 finest gold. 

The mere choice and arrangement of his words 
would have sufficed to make his essays classical. For 
never, not even by Dry den, not even by Temple,° had 
the English language been written with such sweet- 
ness, grace, and facility. But this was the smallest 
part of Addison's praise. Had he clothed his thoughts 
in the half French style of Horace Walpole,° or in 
the half Latin style of Dr. Johnson, or in the half 
German jargon of the present day, his genius would 

20 have triumphed over all faults of manner. As a 
moral satirist he stands unrivalled. If ever the best 
Tatlers and Spectators were equalled in their own 
kind, we should be inclined to guess that it must have 
been by the lost comedies of Menander.° 

In wit, properly so called, Addison was not inferior 



ADDISON 77 

to Cowley or Butler.° No single ode of Cowley con- 
tains so many happy analogies as are crowded into the 
lines to Sir Godfrey Kneller°; and we would undertake 
to collect from the Spectators as great a number of 
ingenious illustrations as can be found in Hudibras. 
The still higher faculty of invention Addison possessed 
in still larger measure. The numerous fictions, gener- 
ally original, often wild and grotesque, but always 
singularly graceful and happy, which are found in 
his essays, fully entitle him to the rank of a great lo 
poet, a rank to which his metrical compositions give 
him no claim. As an observer of life, of manner, of 
all the shades of human character, he stands in the 
first class. And what he observed he had the art of 
communicating in two widely different ways. He 
could describe virtues, vices, habits, whims, as well as 
Clarendon. ° But he could do something better. He 
could call human beings into existence, and make them 
exhibit themselves. If we wish to find anything more 
vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go either 20 
to Shakespeare or Cervantes. ° 

But what shall we say of Addison's humor, of his 
sense of the ludicrous, of his power of awakening that 
sense in others, and of drawing mirth from incidents 
which occur every day, and from little peculiarities of 



78 ADDISON 

temper and manner, such as may be found in every 
man? We feel the charm: we give ourselves up to 
it : but we strive in vain to analyze it. 

Perhaps the best way of describing Addison's pecul- 
iar pleasantry is to compare it with the pleasantry of 
some other great satirists. The three most eminent 
masters of the art of ridicule during the eighteenth 
century, were, we conceive, Addison, Swift, and Vol- 
taire. ° Which of the three had the greatest power of 

10 moving laughter may be questioned. But each of 
them, within his own domain, was supreme. 

Voltaire is the prince of buffoons. His merriment 
is without disguise or restraint. He gambols; he 
grins; he shakes the sides; he points the finger; he 
turns up the nose ; he shoots out the tongue. The 
manner of Swift is the very opposite to this. He 
moves laughter, but never joins in it. He appears in 
his works such as he appeared in society. All the com- 
pany are convulsed with merriment, while the Dean, 

20 the author of all the mirth, preserves an invincible 
gravity, and even sourness of aspect, and gives utter- 
ance to the most eccentric and ludicrous fancies, with 
the air of a man reading the commination service. 

The manner of Addison is as remote from that of 
Swift as from that of Voltaire. He neither laughs 



ADDISON 79 

out like the French wit, nor, like the Irish wit, throws 
a double portion of severity into his countenance 
while laughing inwardly, but preserves a look pecul- 
iarly his own, a look of demure serenity, disturbed 
only by an arch sparkle of the eye, an almost imper- 
ceptible elevation of the brow, an almost impercepti- 
ble curl of the lip. His tone is never that either of 
a Jack Pudding ° or of a Cynic. ° It is that of a 
gentleman, in whom the quickest sense of the ridicu- 
lous is constantly tempered by good nature and good lo 
breeding. 

We own that the humor of Addison is, in our opinion, 
of a more delicate flavor than the humor of either 
Swift or Voltaire. Thus much, at least, is certain, 
that both Swift and Voltaire have been successfully 
mimicked, and that no man has yet been able to mimic 
Addison. The letter of the Abbe Coyer ° to Pan- 
sophe is Voltaire all over, and imposed, during a long 
time on the Academicians of Paris. There are pas- 
sages in Arbuthnot's ° satirical works which we, at 20 
least, cannot distinguish from Swift's best writing. 
But of the many eminent men who have made Addi- 
son their model, though several have copied his mere 
diction with happy effect, none have been able to 
catch the tone of his pleasantry. In the World,° in 



80 ADDISON 

the Connoisseur, in the Mirror, in the Lounger, 
there are numerous papers written in obvious imita- 
tion of his Tatlers and Spectators. Most of these 
papers have some merit: many are very lively and 
amusing ; but there is not a single one which could be 
passed off as Addison's on a critic of the smallest 
perspicacity. 

But that which chiefly distinguishes Addison from 
Swift, from Voltaire, from almost all the other great 

10 masters of ridicule, is the grace, the nobleness, the 
moral purity, which we find even in his merriment. 
Severity, gradually hardening and darkening into 
misanthropy, characterizes the works of Swift. The 
nature of Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman ; but he 
venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of 
art nor in the purest examples of virtue, neither in 
the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the 
grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. 
The more solemn and august the theme, the more 

20 monkey-like was his grimacing and chattering. The 
mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles ° ; the 
mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck.° If, as Soame 
Jenyns ° oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of 
Seraphim and just men made perfect be derived from 
an exquisite perception of the ludicrous, their mirth 



ADDISON 81 

must surely be none other than the mirth of Addi- 
son; a mirth consistent with tender compassion for 
all that is frail, and with profound reverence for all 
that is sublime. Nothing great, nothing amiable, no 
moral duty, no doctrine of natural or revealed religion, 
has ever been associated by Addison with any degrad- 
ing idea. His humanity is without a parallel in liter- 
ary history. The highest proof of virtue is to possess 
boundless power without abusing it. No kind of power 
is more formidable than the power of making men lo 
ridiculous ; and that power Addison possessed in 
boundless measure. How grossly that power was 
abused by Swift and by Voltaire is Avell known. But 
of Addison it may be confidently affirmed that he has 
blackened no man's character, nay, that it would be 
difficult, if not impossible, to find in all the volumes 
which he has left us a single taunt which can be 
called ungenerous or unkind. Yet he had detractors, 
whose malignity might have seemed to justify as ter- 
rible a revenge as that which men, not superior to him 20 
in genius, wreaked on Bettesworth° and on Franc de 
Porapignan.° He was a politician ; he was the best 
writer of his party ; he lived in times of fierce excite- 
ment, in times when persons of high character and 
station stooped to scurrility such as is now practised 



82 ADDISON 

oiily by the basest of mankind. Yet no provocation 
and no example could induce him to return railing for 
railing. 

Of the service which his essays rendered to moral- 
ity it is difficult to speak too highly. It is true, that, 
when the Tatler appeared, that age of outrageous 
profaneness and licentiousness which followed the 
Restoration had passed away. Jeremy Collier ° had 
shamed the theatres into something which, compared 

10 with the excesses of Etherege° and Wycherley,° might 
be called decency. Yet there still lingered in the 
public mind a pernicious notion that there was some 
connection between genius and profligacy, between the 
domestic virtues and the sullen formality of the Puri- 
tans. That error it is the glory of Addison to have 
dispelled. He taught the nation that the faith and 
the morality of Hale ° and Tillotson ° might be found 
in company with wit more sparkling than the wit of 
Congreve, and with humor richer than the humor of 

2oVanbrugh.° So effectually, indeed, did he retort on 
vice the mockery which had recently been directed 
against virtue, that, since his time, the open violation 
of decency has always been considered among us as 
the mark of a fool. And this revolution, the greatest 
and most salutary ever effected by any satirist, he 



ADDISON 83 

accomplished, be it remembered, without writing one 
personal lampoon. 

In the early contributions of Addison to the Tatler 
his peculiar powers were not fully exhibited. Yet 
from the first, his superiority to all his coadjutors was 
evident. Some of his later Tatlers are fully equal to 
anything that he ever wrote. Among the portraits, 
we most admire Tom rolio,° Ned Softly,° and the 
Political Upholsterer.° The proceedings of the Court 
of Honor,"" the Thermometer of Zeal,° the story of the : 
Frozen Words,° the Memoirs of the Shilling," are 
excellent specimens of that ingenious and lively 
species of fiction in which Addison excelled all men. 
There is one still better paper of the same class. But 
though that paper, a hundred and thirty-three years 
ago, was probably thought as edifying as one of 
Smalridge's ° sermons, we dare not indicate it to the 
squeamish readers of the nineteenth century. 

During the session of Parliament which commenced 
in November, 1709, and which the impeachment of: 
Sacheverell has made memorable, Addison appears to 
have resided in London. The Tatler was now more 
popular than any periodical paper had. ever been; and 
his connection with it was generally known. It was 
not known, however, that almost everything good in 



84 ADDISON 

the Tatler was his. The truth is, that the fifty or 
sixty numbers which we owe to him were not merely 
the best, but so decidedly the best that any five of 
them are more valuable than all the two hundred 
numbers in which he had no share. ° 

He required, at this time, all the solace which he 
could derive from literary success. The Queen had 
always disliked the Whigs. She had during some 
years disliked the Marlborough family. But, reigning 

10 by a disputed title, she could not venture directly to 
oppose herself to a majority of both Houses of Parlia- 
ment ; and, engaged as she was in a war ° on the event 
of which her own Crown was staked, she could not 
venture to disgrace a great and successful general. 
But at length, in the year 1710, the causes which had 
restrained her from showing her aversion to the Low 
Church party ceased to operate. The trial of Sachev- 
erell produced an outbreak of public feeling scarcely 
less violent than the outbreaks which we can ourselves 

20 remember in 1820, and in 1831.° The country gentle- 
men, the country clergymen, the rabble of the towns, 
were all for once, on the same side. It was clear that, 
if a general election took place before the excitement 
abated, the Tories would have a majority. The ser- 
vices of Marlborough had been so splendid that they 



ADDISON 85 

were no longer necessary. The Queen's throne was 
secure froin all attacks on the part of Lewis. Indeed, 
it seemed much more likely that the English and Ger- 
man armies w^ould divide the spoils of Versailles ° and 
Marli ° than that a Marshal of France would bring 
back the Pretender to St. James's.° The Queen, act- 
ing by the advice of Harley, determined to dismiss her 
servants. In June the change commenced. Sunder- 
land was the first who fell. The Tories exulted over 
his fall. The Whigs tried, during a few weeks, to lo 
persuade themselves that her Majesty had acted only 
from personal dislike to the Secretary, and that she 
meditated no further alteration. But, early in August, 
Godolphin was surprised by a letter from Anne, which 
directed him to break his white staff.'' Even after this 
event, the irresolution or dissimulation of Harley kept 
up the hopes of the Whigs during another month: 
and then the ruin became rapid and violent. The 
Parliament was dissolved. The Ministers were turned 
out. The Tories were called to office. The tide of 20 
popularity ran violently in favor of the High Church 
party. That party, feeble in the late House of Com- 
mons, was now irresistible. The power which the 
Tories had thus suddenly acquired, they used with 
blind and stupid ferocity. The howl which the whole 



86 ADDISON 

pack set up for prey and for blood appalled even him 
who had roused and unchained them. When, at this 
distance of time, we calmly review the conduct of 
the discarded ministers, we cannot but feel a move- 
ment of indignation at the injustice with which they 
were treated. No body of men had ever administered 
the government with more energy, ability, and moder- 
ation; and their success had been proportioned to 
their wisdom. They had saved Holland and Ger- 

10 many. They had humbled France. They had, as it 
seemed, all but torn Spain from the house of Bourbon. 
They had made England the first power in Europe. 
At home they had united England and Scotland. 
They had respected the rights of conscience and the 
liberty of the subjects. They retired, leaving their 
country at the height of prosperity and glory. And 
yet they were pursued to their retreat by such a roar 
of obloquy as was never raised against the government 
which threw away thirteen colonies, or against the 

20 government which sent a gallant army to perish in the 
ditches of Walcheren.° 

None of the Whigs suffered more in the general 
wreck than Addison. He had just sustained some 
heavy pecuniary losses, of the nature of which we are 
imperfectly informed, when his Secretaryship was 



ADDISON 87 

taken from him. He had reason to believe that he 
should also be deprived of the small Irish office which 
he held by patent. He had just resigned his Fellow- 
ship. It seems probable that he had already ventured 
to raise his eyes to a great lady, and that, while his 
political friends were in power, and while his own fort- 
unes were rising, he had been, in the phrase of the 
romances which were then fashionable, permitted to 
hope. But Mr. Addison the ingenious writer, and Mr. 
Addison the Chief Secretary, were, in her ladyship's lo 
opinion, two very different persons. All these calam- 
ities united, however, could not disturb the serene 
cheerfulness of a mind conscious of innocence, and rich 
in its own wealth. He told his friends, with smiling 
resignation, that they ought to admire his philosophy, 
that he had lost at once his fortune, his place, his Fel- 
lowship, and his mistress, that he must think of turn- 
ing tutor again, and yet that his spirits were as good 
as ever. 

He had one consolation. Of the unpopularity which 20 
his friends had incurred, he had no share. Such was 
the esteem with which he was regarded that, while the 
most violent measures were taken for the purpose of 
forcing Tory members on Whig corporations, he was 
returned to Parliament without even a contest. Swift, 



88 ADDISON 

who was now in London, and who had already deter- 
mined on quitting the Whigs, wrote to Stella in these 
remarkable words : " The Tories carry it among the 
new members six to one. Mr. Addison's election has 
passed easy and undisputed ; and I believe if he had a 
mind to be king he would hardly be refused." 

The good-will with which the Tories regarded Addi- 
son is the more honorable to him, because it had not 
been purchased by any concession on his part. Dur- 

lo ing the general election he published a political Jour- 
nal, entitled the Whig Examiner." Of that Journal, it 
may be sufficient to say that Johnson, in spite of his 
strong political prejudices, pronounced it to be supe- 
rior in wit to any of Swift's writings on the other side. 
When it ceased to appear, Swift, in a letter to Stella, 
expressed his exultation at the death of so formidable 
an antagonist. '^ He might well rejoice," says Johnson, 
^' at the death of that which he could not have killed." 
" On no occasion," he adds, " was the genius of Addison 

20 more vigorously exerted, and on none did the superior- 
ity of his powers more evidently appear." 

The only use which Addison appears to have made 
of the favor with which he was regarded by the 
Tories was to save some of his friends from the gen- 
eral ruin of the Whig party. He felt himself to be 



ADDISON -89 

in a situation which made it his duty to take a de- 
cided part in politics. But the case of Steele and 
Ambrose Phillipps was different. For Phillipps, 
Addison even condescended to solicit, with what 
success we have not ascertained. Steele held two 
places. He was Gazetteer, and he was also a Com- 
missioner of Stamps. The Gazette was taken from 
him. But he was suffered to retain his place in the 
Stamp Office, on an implied understanding that he 
should not be active against the new government ; lo 
and he was, during more than two years, induced by 
Addison to observe this armistice with tolerable 
fidelity. 

Isaac Bickerstaff accordingly became silent upon 
politics, and the article of news which had once 
formed about one-third of his paper, altogether 
disappeared. The Tatler had completel}^ changed 
its character. It was now nothing but a series of 
essays on books, morals, and manners. Steele there- 
fore resolved to bring it to a close and to commence 20 
a new work on an improved plan. It was announced 
that this new work would be published daily. The 
undertaking was generally regarded as bold, or 
rather rash ; but the event amply justified the confi- 
dence with which Steele relied on the fertility of 



90 ADDISON 

Addison's genius. On the second of January, ITll, 
appeared the last Tatler. At the beginning of March 
following appeared the first of an incomparable series 
of papers, containing observations on life and litera- 
ture by an imaginary Spectator." 

The Spectator himself was conceived and drawn by 
Addison ; and it is not easy to doubt that the portrait 
was meant to be in some features a likeness of the 
painter. The Spectator is a gentleman who, after 

10 passing a studious youth at the university, has 
travelled on classic ground, and has bestowed much 
attention on curious points of antiquity. He has, 
on his return, fixed his residence in London, and has 
observed all the forms of life which are to be found 
in that great city, has daily listened to the wits of 
Will's, has smoked with the philosophers of the 
Grecian, and has mingled with the parsons at Child's, 
and with the politicians at the St. James's. In the 
morning, he often listens to the hum of the Ex- 

20 change ; in the evening, his face is constantly to be 
seen in the pit of Drury Lane theatre. But an in- 
surmountable bashfulness prevents him from opening 
his mouth, except in a small circle of intimate friends. 
These friends were first sketched by Steele. Four 
of the club, the templar, the clergyman, the soldier, 



ADDISON 91 

and the merchant, were uninteresting figures, fit only 
for a background. But the other two, an old country 
baronet and an old town rake, though not delineated 
with a very delicate pencil, had some good strokes. 
Addison took the rude outlines into his own hands, 
retouched them, colored them, and is in truth the 
creator of the Sir Roger de Coverley and the Will 
Honeycomb with whom we are all familiar. 

The plan of the Spectator must be allowed to be 
both original and eminently happy. Every valuable lo 
essay in the series may be read with pleasure sepa- 
rately; yet the five or six hundred essays form a 
whole, and a whole which has the interest of a novel. 
It must be remembered, too, that at that time no 
novel, giving a lively and powerful picture of the 
common life and manners of England, had appeared. 
Eichardson° was working as a compositor. Fielding 
was robbing birds' nests. Smollett ° was not yet born. 
The narrative, therefore, which connects together the 
Spectator's Essays, gave to our ancestors their first 20 
taste of an exquisite and untried pleasure. That 
narrative was indeed constructed with no art or 
labor. The events were such events as occur every 
day. Sir Eoger comes up to town to see Eugenio, 
as the worthy baronet always calls Prince Eugene, 



92 ' ADDISON 

goes with the Spectator on the water to Spring Gar- 
dens, walks among the tombs in the Abbey, and is 
frightened by the Mohawks,° but conquers his appre- 
hension so far as to go to the theatre when the Dis- 
tressed Mother ° is acted. The Spectator pays a visit 
in the summer to Coverley Hall, is charmed with the 
old house, the old butler, and the old chaplain, eats 
a jack caught by Will Wimble, rides to the assizes, 
and hears a point of law discussed by Tom Touchy.° 

10 At last a letter from the honest butler brings to the 
club the news that Sir Eoger is dead. Will Honey- 
comb marries and reforms at sixty. The club breaks 
up ; and the Spectator resigns his functions. Such 
events can hardly be said to form a plot ; yet they 
are related with such truth, such grace, such wit, 
such humor, such pathos, such knowledge of the 
human heart, such knowledge of the ways of the 
world, that they charm us on the hundredth perusal. 
We have not the least doubt that if Addison had 

20 written a novel, on an extensive plan, it would have 
been superior to any that we possess. As it is, he is 
entitled to be considered not only as the greatest of 
the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the 
great English novelists. 

We say this of Addison alone; for Addison is the 



ADDISON 93 

Specta,tor. A.bout three sevenths of the work are his; 
and it is no exaggeration to say that his worst essay 
is as good as the best essay of any of his coadjutors. 
His best essays approach near to absolute perfection ; 
nor is their excellence more wonderful than their 
variety. His invention never seems to flag ; nor is he 
ever under the necessity of repeating himself, or of 
wearing out a subject. There are no dregs in his 
wine. He regales us after the fashion of that prodigal 
nabob ° who held that there was only one good glass in lo 
a bottle. As soon as we have tasted the first sparkling 
foam of a jest, it is withdrawn and a fresh draught of 
nectar is at our lips. On the Monday we have an 
allegory as lively and ingenious as Lucian's ° Auction 
of Lives; on the Tuesday, an Eastern apologue as 
richly colored as the Tales of Scheherezade ° ; on the 
Wednesday, a character described with the skill of a 
La Bruyere ° ; on the Thursday, a scene from common 
life, equal to the best chapters in the Vicar of Wake- 
field ; on the Friday some sly Horatian pleasantry on 20 
fashionable follies, on hoops, patches, or puppet shows ; 
and on the Saturday a religious meditation, which will 
bear a comparison with the finest passages in Mas- 
sillon.° 

It is dangerous to select where there is so much that 



94 ADDISON 

deserves the highest praise. We will venture, however, 
to say that any person who wishes to form a notion of 
the extent and variety of Addison's powers, will do 
well to read at one sitting the following papers : the 
two Visits to the Abbey, the Visit to the Exchange, 
the Journal of the Ketired Citizen, the Vision of 
Mirza, the Transmigrations of Pug the Monkey, and 
the Death of Sir Eoger de Coverley.* 

The least valuable of Addison's contributions to the 

10 Spectator are, in the judgment of our age, his critical 
papers. Yet his critical papers are always luminous, 
and often ingenious. The very worst of them must be 
regarded as creditable to him, when the character of 
the school in which he had been trained is fairly con- 
sidered. The best of them were much too good for his 
readers. In truth, he was not so far behind our 
generation as he was before his own. No essays in 
the Spectator were more censured and derided than 
those in which he raised his voice against the contempt 

20 with which our fine old ballads were regarded, and 
showed the scoffers that the same gold which, burn- 
ished and polished, gives lustre to the ^Eneid and the 

* Nos. 26, 329, 09, 317, 159, 343, 517. These papers are all in the 
first seven volumes. The eighth must be considered as a separate 
work. 



ADDISON 95 

Odes of Horace, is mingled with the rude dross of 
Chevy Chace.° 

It is not strange that the success of the Spectator 
should have been such as no similar work has ever 
obtained. The number of copies daily distributed 
was at first three thousand. It subsequently in- 
creased, and had risen to near four thousand when 
the stamp tax was imposed. ° That tax was fatal to 
a crowd of journals. The Spectator, however, stood 
its ground, doubled its price, and, though its circula- lo 
tion fell off, still yielded a large revenue both to the 
state and to the authors. For particular papers, the 
demand was immense; of some, it is said, twenty 
thousand copies were required. But this was not all. 
To have the Spectator served up every morning with 
the bohea and rolls was a luxury for the few. The 
majority were content to wait till essays enough had 
appeared to form a volume. Ten thousand copies of 
each volume were immediately taken off, and new 
editions were called for. It must be remembered 20 
that the population of England was then hardly a 
third of what it now is. The number of Englishmen 
who were in the habit of reading, was probably not 
a sixth of what it now is. A shop-keeper or a farmer 
who found any pleasure in literature, was a rarity. 



96 ADDISON 

Nay, there was doubtless more than one knight of the 
shire whose country seat did not contain ten books, 
receipt books and books on farriery included. In 
these circumstances, the sale of the Spectator must 
be considered as indicating a popularity quite as 
great as that of the most successful works of Sir 
Walter Scott and Mr. Dickens in our own time. 

At the close of 1712 the Spectator ceased to appear. 
It was probably felt that the short-faced gentleman 

10 and his club had been long enough before the town ; 
and that it was time to withdraw them, and to replace 
them by a new set of characters. In a few weeks the 
first number of the Guardian ° was published. But the 
Guardian was unfortunate both in its birth and in its 
death. It began in dulness and disappeared in a tem- 
pest of faction. The original plan was bad. Addison 
contributed nothing until sixty-two numbers had ap- 
peared ; and it was then impossible to make the Guar- 
dian what the Spectator had been. Nestor Ironside 

2oand the Miss Lizards were people to whom even he 
could impart no interest. He could only furnish 
some excellent little essays, both serious and comic; 
and this he did. 

Why Addison gave no assistance to the Guardian 
during the first two months of its existence, is a ques- 



ADDISON 97 

tion wliich has puzzled the editors and biographers, 
but which seems to us to admit of a very easy solu- 
tion. He was then engaged in bringing his Cato ° on 
the stage. 

The first four acts of this drama had been lying in 
his desk since his return from Italy. His modest and 
sensitive nature shrank from the risk of a public and 
shameful failure ; and, though all who saw the manu- 
script were loud in praise, some thought it possible 
that an audience might become impatient even of very lo 
good rhetoric, and advised Addison to print the play 
without hazarding a representation. At length, after 
many fits of apprehension, the poet yielded to the 
urgency of his political friends, who hoped that the 
public would discover some analogy between the fol- 
lowers of Caesar and the Tories, between Sempronius 
and the apostate Whigs, between Cato, struggling 
to the last for the liberties of Eome, and the band 
of patriots who still stood firm round Halifax and 
Wharton. 20 

Addison gave the play to the managers of Drury 
Lane theatre, without stipulating for any advantage 
to himself. They, therefore, thought themselves 
bound to spare no cost in scenery and dresses. The 
decorations, it is true, would not have pleased the 



98 ADDISON 

skilful eye of Mr. Macready.° Juba's waistcoat blazed 
with gold lace ; Marcia's hoop was worthy of a 
Duchess on the birthday ; and Cato ° wore a wig worth 
fifty guineas. The prologue was written by Pope, 
and is imdoubtedly a dignified and spirited compo- 
sition. The part of the hero was excellently played 
by Booth.° Steele undertook to pack a house. The 
boxes were in a blaze with the stars of the Peers in 
Opposition. The pit was crowded with attentive and 

10 friendly listeners from the Inns of Court and the liter- 
ary coffee-houses. Sir Gilbert Heathcote,° Governor of 
the Bank of England, was at the head of a powerful 
body of auxiliaries from the city, warm men and true 
Whigs, but better known at Jonathan's and Garra- 
way's than in the haunts of wits and critics. 

These precautions were quite superfluous. The To- 
ries, as a body, regarded Addison with no unkind feel- 
ings. Nor was it for their interest, professing, as they 
did, profound reverence for law and prescription, and 

20 abhorrence both of popular insurrections and of stand- 
ing armies, to appropriate to themselves reflections 
thrown on the great military chief and demagogue, 
who, with the support of the legions and of the com- 
mon people, subverted all the ancient institutions of 
his country. Accordingly, every shout that was raised 



ADDISON 99 

by the members of the Kit Cat was echoed by the High 
Churchmen of the October ; and the curtain at length 
fell amidst thunders of unanimous applause. 

The delight and admiration of the town were de- 
scribed by the Guardian in terms which we might 
attribute to partiality, were it not that the Examiner, 
the organ of the Ministry, held similar language. The 
Tories, indeed, found much to sneer at in the conduct 
of their opponents. Steele had on this, as on other 
occasions, shown more zeal than taste or judgment. lo 
The honest citizens who marched under the orders of 
Sir Gibby,° as he was facetiously called, probably knew 
better when to buy and when to sell stock than when 
to clap and when to hiss at a play, and incurred some 
ridicule by making the hypocritical Sempronius their 
favorite, and by giving to his insincere rants louder 
plaudits than they bestowed on the temperate eloquence 
of Cato. WhartoD, too, who had the incredible effront- 
ery to applaud the lines about flying from prosperous 
vice and from the power of impious men to a private 20 
station, did not escape the sarcasms of those who justly 
thought that he could fly from nothing more vicious 
or impious than himself. The epilogue, which was 
written by Garth, ° a zealous Whig, was severely and 
not unreasonably censured as ignoble and out of place. 



100 ADDISON 

But Addison was described, even by the bitterest Tory- 
writers, as a gentleman of wit and virtue, in whose 
friendship many persons of both parties were happy, 
and whose name ought not to be mixed up with fac- 
tious squabbles. 

Of the jests by which the triumph of the Whig 
party was disturbed, the most severe and happy was 
Boliugbroke's. Between two acts, he sent for Booth 
to his box, and presented him, before the whole thea- 

lotre, with a purse of fifty guineas for defending the 
cause of liberty so well against a perpetual Dictator." 
This was a pungent allusion to the attempt which 
Marlborough had made, not long before his fall, to 
obtain a patent creating him Captain General for 
life. 

It was April ; and in April, a hundred and thirty 
years ago, the London season was thought to be far 
advanced. During a whole month, however, Cato was 
performed to overflowing houses, and brought into the 

20 treasury of the theatre twice the gains of an ordinary 
spring. In the summer the Drury Lane company 
went down to the Act at Oxford,° and there, before an 
audience which retained an affectionate remembrance 
of Addison's accomplishments and virtues, his tragedy 
was enacted during several days. The gownsmen 



ADDISON . 101 

began to besiege the theatre in the forenoon, and by 
one in the afternoon all the seats were filled. 

About the merits of the piece which had so ex- 
traordinary an effect, the public, we suppose, has made 
up its mind. To compare it with the masterpieces of 
the Attic stage, with the great English dramas of the 
time of Elizabeth, or even with the productions of 
Schiller's ° manhood, would be absurd indeed. Yet it 
contains excellent dialogue and declamation, and, 
among plays fashioned on the French model, must be lo 
allowed to rank high ; not indeed with Athalie ° or 
Saul ° ; but, we think not below Cinna,° and certainly 
above any other English tragedy of the same school, 
above many of the plays of Corneille, above many of 
the plan's of Voltaire and Alfieri, and above some 
plays of Eacine. Be this as it may, we have little 
doubt that Cato did as much as the Tatlers, Spectators, 
and Freeholders united, to raise Addison's fame among 
his contemporaries. 

The modesty and good nature of the successful 20 
dramatist had tamed even the malignity of faction. 
But literary envy, it should seem, is a fiercer passion 
than party spirit. It was by a zealous Whig that the 
fiercest attack on the Whig tragedy was made. John 
Dennis ° published Eemarks on Cato, which were writ- 



102 ADDISON 

ten with some acuteness and with much coarseness 
and asperity. Addison neither defended himself nor 
retaliated. On many points he had an excellent de- 
fence; and nothing would have been easier than to 
retaliate ; for Dennis had written bad odes, bad trage- 
dies, bad comedies ; he had, moreover, a larger share 
than most men of those infirmities and eccentricities 
which excite laughter ; and Addison's power of turning 
either an absurd book or an absurd man into ridicule 

10 was unrivalled. Addison, however, serenely conscious 
of his superiority, looked with pity on his assailant, 
whose temper, naturally irritable and gloomy, had 
been soured by want, by controversy, and by literary 
failures. 

But among the young candidates for Addison's 
favor, there was one distinguished by talents from the 
rest, and distinguished, we fear, not less by malignity 
and insincerity. Pope was only twenty-five. But his 
powers had expanded to their full maturity ; and his 

20 best poem, the Eape of the Lock, had recently been 
published. Of his genius, Addison had always ex- 
pressed high admiration. But Addison had early 
discerned, what might indeed have been discerned by 
an eye less penetrating than his, that the diminutive, 
crooked, sickly boy was eager to revenge himself on 



ADDISON 103 

society for the unkinclness of nature. In the Specta- 
tor, the Essay on Criticism had been praised with 
cordial warmth ; but a gentle hint had been added, 
that the writer of so excellent a poem would have 
done well to avoid ill-natured personalities. Pope, 
though evidently more galled by the censure than 
gratified by the praise, returned thanks for the ad- 
monition, and promised to profit by it. The two 
writers continued to exchange civilities, counsel, and 
small good offices. Addison publicly extolled Pope's lo 
miscellaneous pieces; and Pope furnished Addison 
with a prologue. This did not last long. Pope hated 
Dennis, whom he had injured without provocation. 
The appearance of the Remarks on Cato gave the 
irritable poet an opportunity of venting his malice 
under the show of friendship; and such an opportu- 
nity could not but be welcomed to a nature which was 
implacable in enmity, and which always preferred the 
tortuous to the straight path. He published, accord- 
ingly, the Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis. 20 
But Pope had mistaken his powers. He was a great 
master of invective and sarcasm ; he could dissect a 
character in terse and sonorous couplets, brilliant with 
antitheses : but of dramatic talent he was altogether 
destitute. If he had written a lampoon on Dennis, 



104 ADDIS ox 

such as that on Atticiis,° or that on Sporus,° the old 
grumbler would have been crushed. But Pope writing 
dialogue resembled — to borrow Horace's imagery and 
his own — a wolf, which, instead of biting, should take 
to kicking, or a monkey which should try to sting. 
The narrative is utterly contemptible. Of argument 
there is not even the show ; and the jests are such as, 
if they were introduced into a farce, would call forth 
the hisses of the shilling gallery. Dennis raves about 

lo the drama ; and the nurse thinks that he is calling for 
a dram. "There is," he cries, "no peripetia ° in the 
tragedy, no change of fortune, no change at all." 
" Pray, good Sir, be not angry," says the old woman ; 
"I'll fetch change." This is not exactly the pleas- 
antry of Addison. 

There can be no doubt that Addison saw through 
his officious zeal, and felt himself deeply aggrieved by 
it. So foolish and spiteful a pamphlet could do him 
no good, and, if he were thought to have any hand in 

20 it, must do him harm. Gifted with incomparable 
powers of ridicule, he had never, even in self-defence, 
used those powers inhumanly or uncourteously ; and 
he was not disposed to let others make his fame and 
his interests a pretext under which they might commit 
outrages from which he had himself constantly ab- 



ADDISON 105 

stained. He accordingly declared that he had no 
concern in the Narrative, that he disapproved of it, 
and that if he answered the Remarks, he v,^ould answer 
them like a gentleman ; and he took care to communi- 
cate this to Dennis. Pope was bitterly mortified; 
and to this transaction Ave are inclined to ascribe 
the hatred with which he ever after regarded Addi- 
son. 

In September, 1713, the Guardian ceased to appear. 
Steele had gone mad about politics. A general elec- lo 
tion had just taken place : he had been chosen member 
for Stockbridge ; and he fully expected to play a first 
part in Parliament. The immense success of the 
Tatler and Spectator had turned his head. He had 
been the editor of both those papers, and was not aware 
how entirely they owed their influence and popularity 
to the genius of his friend. His spirits, always violent, 
were now excited by vanity, ambition, and faction, to 
such a pitch that he every day committed some offence 
against good sense and good taste. All the discreet 20 
and moderate members of his own party regretted and 
condemned his folly. " I am in a thousand troubles," 
Addison wrote, "about poor Dick, and wish that his 
zeal for the public may not be ruinous to himself. 
But he has sent me word that he has determined to 



106 ADDISON 

go on, and that any advice I may give him in this 
particular will have no weight with him." 

Steele set up a political paper called the Englishman," 
which, as it was not supported by contributions from 
Addison, completely failed. By this work, by some 
other writings of the same kind, and by the airs 
which he gave himself at the first meeting of the new 
Parliament, he made the Tories so angry that they 
determined to expel him. The Whigs stood by him 

10 gallantly, but were unable to save him. The vote of 
expulsion was regarded by all dispassionate men as 
a tyrannical exercise of the power of the majority. 
But Steele's violence and folly, though they by no 
means justified the steps which his enemies took, had 
completely disgusted his friends ; nor did he ever 
regain the place which he had held in the public 
estimation. 

Addison about this time conceived the design of 
adding an eighth volume to the Spectator. In June, 

20 1714, the first number of the new series appeared, and 
diTring about six months three papers were published 
weekly. Nothing can be more striking than the con- 
trast between the Englishman and the eighth volume 
of the Spectator, between Steele without Addison and 
Addison without Steele ; the Englishman is forgotten. 



ADDISON 107 

The eighth volume of the Spectator contains, perhaps, 
the finest essays, both serious and playful, in the 
English language. 

Before this volume was completed, the death of 
Anne produced an entire change in the administration 
of public affairs. The blow fell suddenly. It found 
the Tory party distracted by internal feuds, and 
unprepared for any great effort. Harley had just 
been disgraced. Bolingbroke, it was supposed, would 
be the chief minister. But the Queen was on her lo 
death-bed before the white staff had been given, and 
her last public act was to deliver it with a feeble 
hand to the Duke of Shrewsbury. The emergency 
produced a coalition between all sections of public 
men who were attached to the Protestant succession. 
George the First was proclaimed without opposition. 
A Council, in which the leading Whigs had seats, took 
the direction of affairs till the new King should arrive. 
The first act of the Lords Justices was to appoint 
Addison their Secretary. 20 

There is an idle tradition that he was directed to 
prepare a letter to the King, that he could not satisfy 
himself as to the style of this composition, and that 
the Lords Justices called in a clerk who at once did 
what was wanted. It is not strange that a story so 



108 ADDISON 

flattei-iiig^to mediocrity should be popular; and we 
are sorry to deprive dunces of their consolation. But 
the truth must be told. It was well observed by Sir 
James Mackintosh,^ whose knowledge of these times 
was unequalled, that Addison never, in any official 
document, affected wit or eloquence, and that his 
despatches are, without exception, remarkable for 
unpretending simplicity. Everybody who knoAVS with 
what ease Addison's finest essays were produced must 

10 be convinced that, if well turned phrases had been 
wanted, he would have had no difficulty in finding 
them. We are, however, inclined to believe, that the 
story is not absolutely without a foundation. It may 
well be that Addison did not know, till he had con- 
sulted experienced clerks who remembered the times 
when William the Third was absent on the Continent, 
in what form a letter from the Council of Regency to 
the King ought to be drawn. We think it very likely 
that the ablest statesmen of our time. Lord John Rus- 

20 sell,° Sir Robert Peel,° Lord Palmerston,° for example, 
would, in similar circumstances, be found quite as 
ignorant. Every office has some little mysteries which 
the dullest man may learn with a little attention, and 
which the greatest man cannot possibly know by 
intuition. One paper must be signed by the chief 



ADDISON 109 

of the department ; another by his deputy ; to a third 
the royal sign manual is necessary. One communicar 
tion is to be registered, and another is not. One 
sentence must be in black ink, and another in red ink. 
If the ablest Secretary for Ireland were moved to 
the India Board, if the ablest President of the India 
Board were moved to the War Office, he would require 
instructions on points like these ; and we do not doubt 
that Addison required such instruction when he became, 
for the first time, Secretary to the Lords Justices. lo 

George the First took possession of his kingdom 
without opposition. A new ministry was formed, and 
a new Parliament favorable to the Whigs chosen. Sun- 
derland ° was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; 
and Addison again went to Dublin as Chief Secretary. 

At Dublin Swift resided ; and there was much spec- 
ulation about the way in which the Dean and the 
Secretary would behave towards each other. The 
relations which existed between these remarkable men 
form an interesting and pleasing portion of literary 20 
history. They had early attached themselves to the 
same political party and to the same patrons. While 
Anne's AVhig ministry was in power, the visits of 
Swift to London and the official residence of Addison 
in Ireland had given them opportunities of knowing 



110 ADDISON 

each other. They were the two shrewdest observers 
of their age. But their observations on each other 
had left them to favorable conclusions. Swift did full 
justice to the rare powers of conversation which were 
latent under the bashful deportment of Addison. 
Addison, on the other hand, discerned much good 
nature under the severe look and manner of Swift ; 
and, indeed, the Swift of 1708 and the Swift of 1738 
were two very different men. 

10 But the paths of the two friends diverged widely. 
The Whig statesmen loaded Addison with solid bene- 
fits. They praised Swift, asked him to dinner, and 
did nothing more for him. His profession laid him 
under a difficulty. In the State they could not pro- 
mote him ; and they had reason to fear that, by 
bestowing preferment in the Church on the author of 
the Tale of a Tub,° they might give scandal to the 
public, which had no high opinion of their orthodoxy. 
He did not make fair allow^ance for the difficulties 

20 which prevented Halifax and Somers from serving 
him, thought himself an ill-used man, sacrificed honor 
and consistency to revenge, joined the Tories, and 
became their most formidable champion. He soon 
found, however, that his old friends were less to 
blame than he had supposed. The dislike with which 



ADDISON 111 

the Queen and the heads of the Church regarded him 
was insurmountable ; and it was with the greatest 
difficulty that he obtained an ecclesiastical dignity of 
no great value, on condition of fixing his residence in 
a country which he detested. 

Difference of political opinion had produced, not 
indeed a quarrel, but a coldness between Swift and 
Addison. They at length ceased altogether to see 
each other. Yet there was between them a tacit com- 
pact like that between the hereditary guests in the lo 
Iliad. 

"Eyxea 5* dWrjXuu dXew/xe^a Kai d' djj.i\ov ' 
HoWoI jxkv yap ifxoi TpQes KXeiroi r' eirlKovpoi^ 
KreiJ'eiz/, 6v /ce ^eos ye vopr] /cat irocral klx^iw, 
TloWoi 8' 0,5 aoL Axatot, evaipefxev, ov k€ dvi'Tjai. 

It is not strange that Addison, who calumniated 
and insulted nobody, should not have calumniated or 
insulted Swift. But it is remarkable that Swift, to 
whom genius nor virtue' was sacred, and who generally 
seemed to find, like most other renegades, a peculiar 20 
pleasure in attacking old friends, should have shown 
so much respect and tenderness to Addison. 

Fortune had now changed. The accession of the 
House of Hanover had secured in England the lib- 
erties of the people, and in Ireland the dominion of 



112 ADDISON 

the Protestant caste. To that caste Swift was more 
odious than any other man. He was hooted and even 
pelted in the streets of Dublin ; and could not venture 
to ride along the strand for his health Avithout the 
attendance of armed servants. Many whom he had 
formerly served now libelled and insulted him. At 
this time Addison arrived. He had been advised not 
to show the smallest civility to the Dean of St. Pat- 
rick's. He had answered, with admirable spirit, that 

10 it might be necessary for men whose fidelity to their 
party was suspected, to hold no intercourse with 
political opponents; but that one who had been a 
steady Whig in the worst times might venture, when 
the good cause was triumphant, to shake hands with 
an old friend who was one of the vanquished Tories. 
His kindness was soothing to the proud and cruelly 
wounded spirit of Swift; and the two great satirists 
resumed their habits of friendly intercourse. 

Those associates of Addison, Vhose political opinions 

20 agreed with his, shared his good fortune. He took 
Tickell with him to Ireland. He procured for Budg- 
ell a lucrative place in the same kingdom. Ambrose 
Phillipps was provided for in England. Steele had 
injured himself so much by his eccentricity and per- 
verseness, that he obtained but a very small part of 



ADDISON 113 

what he thought his due. He was, however, knighted ; 
he had a place in the household ; and he subsequently 
received other marks of favor from the court. 

Addison did not remain long in Ireland. In 1715 
he quitted his Secretaryship for a seat at the Board of 
Trade.° In the same year his comedy of the Drummer 
was brought on the stage. The name of the author 
was not announced; the piece was coldly received; 
and some critics have expressed a doubt whether it 
were really Addison's. To us the evidence, both ex- lo 
ternal and internal, seems decisive. It is not in Addi- 
son's best manner ; but it contains numerous passages 
which no other writer known to us could have pro- 
duced. It was again performed after Addison's death, 
and, being known to be his, was loudly applauded. 

Towards the close of the year 1715, while the Rebel- 
lion ° was still raging in Scotland, Addison published 
ihe first number of a paper called the rreeholder.° 
Among his political works the Freeholder is entitled 
to the first place. Even in the Spectator there are 20 
few serious papers nobler than the character of his 
friend Lord Somers, and certainly no satirical papers 
superior to those in which the Tory foxhunter is 
introduced. This character is the original of Squire 
Western, and is drawn with all Fielding's force, and 



114 ADDISON 

with a delicacy of which Fiekling was altogether 
destitute. As none of Addison's works exhibit 
stronger marks of his genius than the Freeholder, 
so none does more honor to his moral character. It 
is difficult to extol too highly the candor and human- 
ity of a political writer whom even the excitement of 
civil war cannot hurry into unseemly violence. Ox- 
ford, it was well known, was then the stronghold of 
Toryism. The High Street had been repeatedly lined 

10 with bayonets in order to keep down the disaffected 
gownsmen; and traitors pursued by the messengers 
of the Government had been concealed in the garrets 
of several colleges. Yet the admonition which, even 
under such circumstances, Addison addressed to the 
University, is singularly gentle, respectful, and even 
affectionate. Indeed, he could not find it in his heart 
to deal harshly even with imaginary persons. His 
foxhunter, though ignorant, stupid, and violent, is at 
heart a good fellow, and is at last reclaimed by the 

20 clemency of the King. Steele was dissatisfied with 
his friend's moderation, and, though he acknowledged 
that the Freeholder was excellently written, com- 
plained that the Ministry played on a lute when it 
was necessary to blow the trumpet. He accordingly 
determined to execute a flourish after his own fashion, 



ADDISOK 115 

and tried to rouse the public spirit of the nation by 
means of a paper called the Town Talk,° which is now 
as utterly forgotten as his Englishman, as his Crisis, as 
his Letter to the Bailiff of Stockbridge, as his Reader, 
in short, as everything that he wrote without the help 
of Addison. 

In the same year in which the Drummer was acted, 
and in which the first numbers of the Freeholder ap- 
peared, the estrangement of Pope and Addison be- 
came complete. Addison had from the first seen that lo 
Pope was false and malevolent. Pope had discovered 
that Addison was jealous. The discovery was made 
in a strange manner. Pope had written the Rape of 
the Lock, in two cantos, without supernatural ma- 
chinery. These two cantos had been loudly ap- 
plauded, and by none more loudly than by Addison. 
Then Pope thought of the Sylphs and Gnomes, Ariel, 
Momentilla, Crispissa, and Umbriel, and resolved 
to interweave the Rosicrusian mythology with the 
original fabric. He asked Addison's advice. Addison 20 
said that the poem as it stood was a delicious little 
thing, and entreated Pope not to run the risk of 
marring what was so excellent in trying to mend it. 
Pope afterwards declared that this insidious counsel 
first opened his eyes to the baseness of him who gave it. 



116 ADDISON 

Now there can be no doubt that Pope's plan was 
most ingenious, and that he afterwards executed it 
with great skill and success. But does it necessarily 
follow that Addison's advice was bad ? And if Addi- 
son's advice was bad, does it necessarily follow that it 
was given from bad motives? If a friend were to 
ask us whether we would advise him to risk his all in 
a lottery of which the chances were ten to one against 
him, we should do our best to dissuade him from run- 

lo ning such a risk. Even if he were so lucky as to get 
the thirty thousand pound prize, we should not admit 
that we had counselled him ill; and we should cer- 
tainly think it the height of injustice in him to ac- 
cuse us of having been actuated by malice. We 
think Addison's advice good advice. It rested on a 
sound principle, the result of long and wide experi- 
ence. The general rule undoubtedly is that, when a 
successful work of imagination has been produced, 
it should not be recast. We cannot at this moment 

20 call to mind a single instance in which this rule has 
been transgressed with happy effect, except the in- 
stance of the Rape of the Lock. Tasso recast his 
Jerusalem. Akenside° recast his Pleasures of the 
Imagination and his Epistle to Curio. Pope himself, 
emboldened no doubt by the success with which he 



ADDISON 111 

had expanded and remodelled the Eape of the Lock, 
made the same experiment on the Dunciad. All 
these attempts failed. Who was to foresee that Pope 
would, once in his life, be able to do what he could 
not himself do twice, and what nobody else has ever 
done ? 

Addison's advice was good, but had it been bad, 
why should we pronounce it dishonest ? Scott tells 
us that one of his best friends predicted the failure of 
Waverley. Herder ° adjured Goethe ° not to take so lo 
unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume ° tried to dis- 
suade Eobertson from writing the history of Charles 
the Fifth. Nay, Pope himself was one of those who 
prophesied that Cato would never succeed on the 
stage, and advised Addison to print it without risking 
a representation. But Scott, Goethe, Eobertson, Ad- 
dison, had the good sense and generosity to give their 
advisers credit for the best intentions. Pope's heart 
was not of the same kind with theirs. 

In 1715, while he was engaged in translating the 20 
Iliad, he met Addison at a coffee-house. Phillipps 
and Budgell were there ; but their sovereign got rid of 
them, and asked Pope to dine with him alone. After 
dinner, Addison said that he lay under a difficulty 
which he wished to explain. " Tickell," he said, 



118 ADDISON 

"translated some time ago the tirst book of the Iliad. 
I have promised to look it over and correct it. I can- 
not therefore ask to see yours ; for that would be 
double dealing." Pope made a civil reply, and 
begged that his second book might have the advantage 
of Addison's revision. Addison readily agreed, looked 
over the second book, and sent it back with warm 
commendations. 

Tickell's version of the first book appeared soon 

10 after this conversation. In the preface, all rivalry was 
earnestly disclaimed. Tickell declared that he should 
not go on with the Iliad. That enterprise he should 
leave to powers which he admitted to be superior to 
his own. His only view, he said, in publishing this 
specimen was to bespeak the favor of the public to a 
translation of the Odyssey, in which he had made 
some progress. 

Addison, and Addison's devoted followers, pro- 
nounced both the versions good, but maintained that 

20 Tickell's had more of the original. The town gave a 
decided preference to Pox3e's. We do not think it 
worth while to settle such a question of precedence, 
i^either of the rivals can be said to have translated the 
Iliad, unless, indeed, the word translation be used in 
the sense which it bears in the Midsummer Night's 



ADDISON 119 

Dream. When Bottom makes his appearance with an 
ass's head instead of his own, Peter Quince exclaims, 
*' Bless thee ! Bottom, bless thee ! thou art translated." 
In this sense, undoubtedly, the readers of either Pope 
or Tickell may very properly exclaim, '' Bless thee ! 
Homer ; thou art translated indeed." 

Our readers will, we hope, agree with us in thinking 
that no man in Addison's situation could have acted 
more fairly and kindly, both towards Pope, and towards 
Tickell, than he appears to have done. But an odious 
suspicion had sprung up in the mind of Pope. He 
fancied, and he soon firmly believed, that there was a 
deep conspiracy against his fame and his fortunes. The 
work on which he had staked his reputation was to be 
depreciated. The subscription, on which rested his 
hopes of a competency, was to be defeated. With this 
view Addison had made a rival translation ; Tickell had 
consented to father it ; and the wits of Button's had 
united to puff it. 

Is there any external evidence to support this grave : 
accusation ? The answer is short. There is absolutely 
none. 

Was there any internal evidence which proved Addi- 
son to be the author of this version ? Was it a work 
which Tickell was incapable of producing ? Surely 



120 ADDISON 

not. Tickell was a Fellow of a College at Oxford, 
and must be supposed to have been able to construe 
the Iliad ; and he was a better versifier than his friend. 
We are not aware that Pope pretended to have dis- 
covered any turns of expression peculiar to Addison. 
Had such turns of expression been discovered, they 
would be sufficiently accounted for by supposing 
Addison to have corrected his friend's lines, as he 
owned that he had done. 

10 Is there anything in the character of the accused 
persons which makes the accusation probable ? We 
answer confidently — nothing. Tickell was long after 
this time described by Pope himself as a very fair 
and worthy man. Addison had been, during many 
years, before the public. Literary rivals, political 
opponents, had kept their eyes on him. But neither 
envy nor faction, in their utmost rage, had ever im- 
puted to him a single deviation from the laws of honor 
and of social morality. Had he been indeed a man 

20 meanly jealous of fame, and capable of stooping to 
base and wicked arts for the purpose of injuring his 
competitors, would his vices have remained latent so 
long? He was a writer of tragedy: had he ever 
injured Rowe ? He was a writer of comedy : had he 
not done ample justice to Congreve, and given valuable 



ADDISON 121 

help to Steele ? He was a pamphleteer : have not his 
good nature and generosity been acknowledged by 
Swift, his rival in fame and his adversary in poli- 
tics ? 

That Tickell should have been guilty of a villany 
seems to us highly improbable. That Addison should 
have been guilty of a villany seems to us highly 
improbable. But that these two men should have 
conspired together to commit a villany seems to us 
improbable in a tenfold degree. All that is known lo 
to us of their intercourse tends to prove, that it 
was not the intercourse of two accomplices in crime. 
These are some of the lines in which Tickell poured 
forth his sorrow over the coffin of Addison : 

" Or dost thou warn poor mortals left behind, 
A task well suited to thy gentle mind ? 
Oh, if sometimes thy spotless form descend, 
To me thine aid, thou guardian genius, lend. 
When rage misguides me, or when fear alarms, 
When pain distresses, or when pleasure charms, 20 

In silent whisperings purer thoughts impart. 
And turn from ill a frail and feeble heart ; 
Lead through the paths thy virtue trod before. 
Till bliss shall join, nor death shall part us more." 

In what words, we should like to know, did this 
guardian genius invite his pupil to join in a plan such 



122 ADDISON 

as the Editor of the Satirist ° would hardly dare to pro- 
pose to the Editor of the Age ° ? 

We do not accuse Pope of bringing an accusation 
which he knew to be false. We have not the smallest 
doubt that he believed it to be true ; and the evidence 
on which he believed it he found in his own bad heart. 
His own life was one long series of tricks, as mean 
and as malicious as that of which he suspected Addi- 
son and Tickell. He was all stiletto and mask. To 

10 injure, to insult, and to save himself from the conse- 
quences of injury and insult by lying and equivocating, 
was the habit of his life. He published a lampoon on 
the Duke of Chandos ° ; he was taxed with it ; and he 
lied and equivocated. He published a lampoon on 
Aaron Hill ° ; he was taxed with it ; and he lied and 
equivocated. He published a still fouler lampoon on 
Lady Mary Wortley Montague ° ; he was taxed with it ; 
and he lied with more than usual effrontery and vehe- 
mence. He puffed himself and abused his enemies 

20 under feigned names. He robbed himself of his own 
letters, and then raised the hue and cry after him. 
Besides his frauds of malignity, of fear, of interest, 
and of vanity, there were frauds which he seems to 
have committed from love of fraud alone. He had a 
habit of stratagem, a pleasure in outwitting all who 



ADDISON 123 

came near him. Whatever his object might be, the 
indirect road to it was that which he preferred. For 
Bolingbroke, Pope undoubtedly felt as much love and 
veneration as it was in his nature to feel for any 
human being. Yet Pope was scarcely dead when it 
was discovered that, from no motive except the mere 
love of artifice, he had been guilty of an act of gross 
perfidy to Bolingbroke.° 

iSTothing was more natural than that such a man as 
this should attribute to others that which he felt lo 
within himself. A i)lain, probable, coherent explana- 
tion is frankly given to him. He is certain that it is 
all a romance. A line of conduct scrupulously fair, 
and even friendly, is pursued towards him. He is 
convinced that it is merely a cover for a vile in- 
trigue by which he is to be disgraced and ruined. It 
is vain to ask him for proofs. He has none, and 
wants none, except those Avhich he carries in his own 
bosom. 

Whether Pope's malignity at length provoked Addi- 20 
son to retaliate for the first and last time, cannot now 
be known with certainty. We have only Pope's story, 
which runs thus. A pamphlet appeared containing 
some reflections which stung Pope to the quick. What 
those reflections were, and whether they were reflec- 



124 ADDISON 

tions of which he had a right to complain, we have 
now no means of deciding. The Earl of Warwick,^ a 
foolish and vicious lad, who regarded Addison with 
the feeling with which such lads generally regard 
their best friends, told Pope, truly or falsely, that 
this pamphlet had been written by Addison's direc- 
tion. When we consider what a tendency stories 
have to grow, in passing even from one honest man 
to another honest man, and when we consider that 

lo to the name of honest man neither Pope nor the Earl 
of AVarwick had a claim, we are not disposed to attach 
much importance to this anecdote. 

It is certain, however, that Pope was fnrious. He 
had already sketched the character of Atticus in prose. 
In his anger he turned his prose into the brilliant and 
energetic lines which everybody knoAvs by heart, or 
ought to know by heart, and sent them to Addison. 
One charge which Pope has enforced with great skill 
is probably not without foundation. Addison was, we 

20 are inclined to believe, too fond of presiding over a 
circle of humble friends. Of the other imputations 
which these famous lines are intended to convey, 
scarcely one has ever been proved to be just, and 
some are certainly false. That Addison was not in 
the habit of "damning with faint praise" appears 



ADDISON 125 

from innumerable passages in his writings, and from 
none more than from those in which he mentions 
Pope. And it is not merely unjust, but ridiculous, 
to describe a man who made the fortune of almost 
every one of his intimate friends, as " so obliging that 
he ne'er obliged." 

That Addison felt the sting of Pope's satire keenly 
we cannot doubt. That he was conscious of one of 
the weaknesses with which he was reproached is 
highly probable. But his heart, we firmly believe, lo 
acquitted him of the gravest part of the accusation. 
He acted like himself. As a satirist he Avas, at his 
own weapons, more than Pope's match; and he would 
have been at no loss for topics. A distorted and 
diseased body, tenanted by a yet more distorted and 
diseased mind; spite and envy thinly disguised by 
sentiments as benevolent and noble as those which 
Sir Peter Teazle ° admired in Mr. Joseph Surface ° ; a 
feeble sickly licentiousness; an odious love of filthy 
and noisome images; these were things which a genius 20 
less powerful than that to which we owe the Spectator 
could easily have held up to the mirth and hatred of 
mankind. Addison had, moreover, at his command, 
other means of vengeance which a bad man would 
not have scrupled to use. He was powerful in the 



126 ADDISON 

State. Pope was a Catholic; and, in those times, a 
minister would have found it easy to harass the most 
innocent Catholic by innumerable petty vexations. 
Pope, near twenty years later, said that "through 
the lenity of the government alone he could live with 
comfort." " Consider," he exclaimed, "the injury that 
a man of high rank and credit may do to a private 
person, under penal laws and many other disadvan- 
tages." It is pleasing to reflect that the only revenge 

10 which Addison took was to insert in the Freeholder a 
warm encomium on the translation of the Iliad, and 
to exhort all lovers of learning to put down their 
names as subscribers. There could be no doubt, he 
said, from the specimens already published, that the 
masterly hand of Pope would do as much for Homer 
as Dvyden had done for Virgil. From that time to 
the end of his life, he always treated Pope, by Pope's 
own acknowledgment, with justice. Friendship was, 
of course, at an end. 

20 One reason which induced the Earl of Warwick to 
play the ignominious part of talebearer on this occa- 
sion, may have been his dislike of the marriage which 
was about to take place between his mother and Addi- 
son. The Countess Dowager,° a daughter of the old 
and honorable family of the Middletons of Chirk, a 



ADDISOK 127 

family which, in any country but ours, would be called 
noble, resided at Holland House.° Addison had, dur- 
ing some years, occupied at Chelsea, a small dwelling, 
once the abode of Nell Gwynn.° Chelsea is now a 
district of London, and Holland House may be called 
a town residence. But, in the days of Anne and 
George the First, milkmaids and sportsmen wandered 
between green hedges, and over fields bright with 
daisies, from Kensington almost to the shore of the 
Thames. Addison and Lady Warwick were country k 
neighbors, and became intimate friends. The great 
wit and scholar tried to allure the young Lord from 
the fashionable amusements of beating watchmen, 
breaking windows, and rolling women in hogsheads 
down Holborn Hill, to the study of letters and the 
practice of virtue. These well meant exertions did 
little good, however, either to the disciple or to the 
master. Lord Warwick grew up a rake ; and Addison 
fell in love. The mature beauty of the Countess has 
been celebrated by poets in language which, after a 2c 
very large allowance has been made for flattery, would 
lead us to believe that she was a fine woman; and her 
rank doubtless heightened her attractions. The court- 
ship was long. The hopes of the lover appear to 
have risen and fallen with the fortunes of his party. 



128 ADDISON 

His attachment was at length a matter of such notori- 
ety that, when he visited Ireland for the last time, 
Eowe addressed some consolatory verses to the Chloe 
of Holland House. It strikes us as a little strange 
that, in these verses, Addison should be called Lyci- 
das,° a name of singularly evil omen for a swain just 
about to cross St. George's Channel. 

At length Chloe capitulated. Addison was indeed 
able to treat with her on equal terms. He had reason 

10 to expect preferment even higher than that which he 
had attained. He had inherited the fortune of a 
brother who died Governor of Madras. He had pur- 
chased an estate in AVarwickshire, and had been wel- 
comed to his domain in very tolerable verse by one of 
the neighboring squires, the poetical foxhunter, Will- 
iam Somerville.° In August, 1716, the newspapers 
announced that Joseph Addison, Esquire, famous for 
many excellent works both in verse and prose, had 
espoused the Countess Dowager of Warwick. 

20 He now fixed his abode at Holland House, a house 
which can boast of a greater number of inmates dis- 
tinguished in political and literary history than any 
other private dwelling in England. His portrait still 
hangs there. The features are pleasing; the complex- 
ion is remarkably fair ; but, in the expression we 



ADDISON 129 

trace rather the gentleness of his disposition than the 
force and keenness of his intellect. 

Not long after his marriage he reached the height 
of civil greatness. The Whig Government had, during 
some time, being torn by internal dissensions. Lord 
Townshend led one section of the Cabinet, Lord Sun- 
derland the other. At length, in the spring of 1717, 
Sunderland triumphed. Townshend retired from of- 
fice, and was accompanied by Walpole and Cowper. 
Sunderland proceeded to reconstruct the Ministry ; lo 
and Addison was appointed Secretary of State. It is 
certain that the Seals were pressed upon him, and 
were at first declined by him. Men equally versed 
in official business might easily have been found ; and 
his colleagues knew that they could not expect assist- 
ance from him in debate. He owed his elevation to 
his popularity, to his stainless probity, and to his lit- 
erary fame. 

But scarcely had Addison entered the Cabinet when 
his health began to fail. From one serious attack he 20 
recovered in the autumn ; and his recovery was cele- 
brated in Latin verses, worthy of his own pen, by 
Vincent Bourne, who was then at Trinity College, 
Cambridge. A relapse soon took place; and, in the 
following spring, Addison was prevented by a severe 



130 ADDISON 

asthma from discharging the duties of his post. He 
resigned it, and was succeeded by his friend Craggs, 
a young man whose natural parts, though little im- 
proved by cultivation, were quick and showy, whose 
graceful person and winning manners had made him 
generally accex)table in society, and who, if he had 
lived, would probably have been the most formidable 
of all the rivals of Walpole. 

As yet there was no Joseph Hume.° The Minis- 
10 ters, therefore, were able to bestow on Addison a retir- 
ing pension of fifteen hundred pounds a year. In 
what form this pension was given we are not told by 
the biographers, and have not time to inquire. But it 
is certain that Addison did not vacate his seat in the 
House of Commons. 

Rest of mind and body seems to have re-established 
his health ; and he thanked God, with cheerful piety, 
for having set him free both from his office and from 
his asthma. Many years seemed to be before him, 
20 and he meditated many works, a tragedy on the death 
of Socrates, a translation of the Psalms, a treatise on 
the evidences of Christianity. Of this last perform- 
ance, a part, which we could well spare, has come 
down to us. 

But the fatal complaint soon returned, and gradu- 



ADDISON 131 

ally prevailed against all the resources of medicine. 
It is melancholy to think that the last months of such 
a life should have been overclouded both by domestic 
and by political vexations. A tradition which began 
early, which has been generally received, and to which 
we have nothing to oppose, has represented his wdfe 
as an arrogant and imperious woman. It is said that, 
till his health failed him, he was glad to escape from 
the Countess Dowager and her magnificent dining- 
room, blazing with the gilded devices of the House lo 
of Eich,° to some tavern where he could enjoy a laugh, 
a talk about Virgil and Boileau, and a bottle of claret, 
with the friends of his happier days. All those friends, 
however, were not left to him. Sir Hichard Steele 
had been gradually estranged by various causes. He 
considered himself as one who, in evil times, had 
braved martyrdom for his political principles, and 
demanded, when the Whig party was triumphant, a 
large compensation for what he had suffered when it 
was militant. The Whig leaders took a very different 20 
view of his claims. They thought that he had, by his 
own petulance and folly, brought them as well as him- 
self into trouble, and though they did not absolutely 
neglect him, doled out favors to him with a sparing 
hand. It was natural that he should be angry with 



132 ADDISON 

them^ and especially angry with Addison. But what 
above all seems to have disturbed Sir Richard, was 
the elevation of Tickell, who, at thirty, was made by 
Addison, Under Secretary of State ; while the Editor 
of the Tatler and Spectator, the author of the Crisis, 
the member for Stockbridge who had been persecuted 
for firm adherence to the House of Hanover, was, at 
near fifty, forced, after many solicitations and com- 
plaints, to content himself with a share in the patent 

10 of Drury Lane theatre. Steele himself says, in his 
celebrated letter to Congreve, that Addison, by his 
preference of Tickell, " incurred the warmest resent- 
ment of other gentlemen ; " and everything seems to 
indicate that, of those resentful gentlemen, Steele was 
himself one. 

-^"While poor Sir E-ichard was brooding over what he 
considered as Addison's unkindness, a new cause of 
quarrel arose. The Whig party, already divided 
against itself, was rent by a new schism. The cele- 

20 brated Bill for limiting the number of Peers had been 
brought in. The proud Duke of Somerset, first in 
rank of all the nobles whose origin permitted them to 
sit in Parliament, was the ostensible author of the 
measure. But it was supported, and, in truth, devised 
by the Prime Minister. 



ADDISON 133 

We are satisfied that the Bill was most pernicious ; 
and we fear that the motives which induced Sunder- 
land to frame it were not honorable to him. But we 
cannot deny that it was supported by many of the 
best and wisest men of that age. Nor was this strange. 
The royal prerogative had, within the memory of the gen- 
eration then in the vigor of life, been so grossly abused, 
that it was still regarded with a jealousy which, when 
the peculiar situation of the House of Brunswick is 
considered, may perhaps be called immoderate. The lo 
particular prerogative of creating peers had, in the 
opinion of the Whigs, been grossly abused by Queen 
Anne's last Ministry; and even the Tories admitted 
that her Majesty, in swamping, as it has since been 
called, the Upper House, had done what only an ex- 
treme case could justify. The theory of the English 
constitution, according to many high authorities, was 
that three independent powers, the sovereign, the 
nobility, and the commons, ought constantly to act as 
checks on each other. If this theory were sound, it 20 
seemed to follow that to put one of these powers 
under the absolute control of the other two, was 
absurd. But if the number of peers were unlimited, 
it could not well be denied that the Upper House was 
under the absolute control of the Crown and the Com- 



134 ADDISON 

mons, and was indebted only to their moderation for 
any power which it might be suffered to retain. 

Steele took part with the Opposition, Addison with 
the Ministers. Steele, in a paper called the Plebeian,° 
vehemently attacked the bill. Sunderland called for 
help on Addison, and Addison obeyed the call. In a 
paper called the Old Whig, he answered, and indeed 
refuted Steele's arguments. It seems to us that the 
premises of both the controversialists were unsound, 

10 that, on those premises, Addison reasoned well and 
Steele ill, and that consequently Addison brought out 
a false conclusion while Steele blundered upon the 
truth. In style, in wit, and in politeness, Addison 
maintained his superiority, though the Old Whig is by 
no means one of his happiest performances. 

At first, both the anonymous opponents observed 
the laws of propriety. But at length Steele so far for- 
got himself as to throw an odious imputation on the 
morals of the chiefs of the administration. Addison 

20 replied with severity, but, in our opinion, with less 
severity than was due to so grave an offence against 
morality and decorum ; nor did he, in his just anger, 
forget for a moment the laws of good taste and good 
breeding. One calumny which has been often re- 
peated, and never yet contradicted, it is our duty to 



ADDISON 135 

expose. It is asserted in the Biographia Britannica, 
that Addison designated Steele as "little Dicky." ° 
This assertion was repeated by Johnson, Avho had 
never seen the Old Whig, and was therefore excusable. 
It has also been repeated by Miss Aikin, who has 
seen the Old Whig, and for whom therefore there is 
less excuse. Now, it is true that the words "little 
Dicky " occur in the Old Whig, and that Steele's name 
was Richard. It is equally true that the words " little 
Isaac " occur in the Duenna,° and that Newton's name lo 
was Isaac. But we confidently affirm that Addison's 
little Dicky had no more to do with Steele, than 
Sheridan's little Isaac with Newton. If we apply the 
words "little Dicky" to Steele, we deprive a very 
lively and ingenious passage, not only of all its wit, 
but of all its meaning. Little Dicky was the nickname 
of Henry Norris, an actor of remarkably small stature, 
but of great humor, who played the usurer Gomez, 
then a most popular part in Dryden's Spanish Friar.^ 

1 We will transcribe the whole paragraph. How it can ever have 
been misunderstood is unintelligible to us. 

"But our author's chief concern is for the poor House of Com- 
mons whom he represents as naked and defenceless, when the 
Crown, by losing this prerogative, would be less able to protect 
them against the power of a House of Lords. Who forbears laugh- 
ing when the Spanish Friar represents little Dicky, under the 



136 ADDISON 

The merited reproof which Steele had received, 
though softened by some kind and courteous expres- 
sions, galled him bitterly. He replied with little 
force and great acrimony; but no rejoinder appeared. 
Addison was fast hastening to his grave ; and had, we 
may well suppose, little disposition to prosecute a 
quarrel with an old friend. His complaint had ter- 
minated in dropsy. He bore up long and manfully. 
But at length he abandoned all hope, dismissed his 
10 physicians, and calmly prepared himself to die. 

His works he intrusted to the care of Tickell, and 
dedicated them a very few days before his death to 
Craggs, in a letter written with the sweet and grace- 
ful eloquence of a Saturday's Spectator. In this, his 
last composition, he alluded to his approaching end in 
words so manly, so cheerful, and so tender, that it is 

person of Gomez, insulting the Colonel who was able to fright him 
out of his wits with a single frown? This Gomez, says he, flew 
upon him like a dragon, got him down, the Devil being strong in 
him, and gave him bastinado on bastinado, and buffet on buffet, 
which the poor Colonel, being prostrate, suffered with a most Chris- 
tian patience. The improbability of the fact never fails to raise 
mirth in the audience ; and one may venture to answer for a British 
House of Commons, if we may guess, from its conduct hitherto, 
that it will scarce be either so tame or so weak as our author 
supposes." 



ADDISON 137 

difficult to read them without tears. At the same 
time he earnestly recommended the interests of Tick- 
ell to the care of Craggs. 

Within a few hours of the time at which this dedi- 
cation was written, Addison sent to beg Gay,° who was 
then living by his wits about town, to come to Holland 
House. Gay went, and was received with great kind- 
ness. To his amazement his forgiveness was implored 
by the dying man. Poor Gay, the most good-natured 
and simple of mankind, could not imagine what he lo 
had to forgive. There was, however, some wrong, the 
remembrance of which weighed on Addison's mind, 
and which he declared himself anxious to repair. He 
was in a state of extreme exhaustion ; and the parting 
was doubtless a friendly one on both sides. Gay sup- 
posed that some plan to serve him had been in agita- 
tion at Court, and had been frustrated by Addison's 
influence. Nor is this improbable. Gay had paid 
assiduous court to the royal family. But in the 
Queen's days he had been the eulogist of Bolingbroke, 20 
and was still connected with many Tories. It is not 
strange that Addison, while heated by conflict, should 
have thought himself justified in obstructing the pre- 
ferment of one whom he might regard as a political 
enemy. Neither is it strange that, when reviewing 



138 ADDISON 

his wliole life, and earnestly scrutinizing all his mo- 
tives, he should think that he had acted an unkind 
and ungenerous part, in using his power against a dis- 
tressed man of letters, who was as harmless and as 
helpless as a child. 

One inference may be drawn from this anecdote. 
It appears that Addison, on his death-bed, called him- 
self to a strict account, and was not at ease till he had 
asked pardon for an injury which it was not even sus- 

lopected that he had committed, for an injury which 
would have caused disquiet only to a very tender con- 
science. Is it not then reasonable to infer that, if he 
had really been guilty of forming a base conspiracy 
against the fame and fortunes of a rival, he would 
have expressed some remorse for so serious a crime ? 
But it is unnecessary to multiply arguments and evi- 
dence for the defence, when there is neither argument 
nor evidence for the accusation. 

The last moments of Addison were perfectly serene. 

20 His interview with his son-in-law is universally known. 
^' See," he said, " how a Christian can die." The piety 
of Addison was, in truth, of a singularly cheerful char- 
acter. The feeling which predominates in all his de- 
votional writings is gratitude. God was to him the 
all-wise and all-powerful friend who had watched over 



ADDISON 139 

his cradle with more than maternal tenderness ; who 
had listened to his cries before they could form them- 
selves into prayer ; who had preserved his youth from 
the snares of vice ; who had made his cup run over 
with worldly blessings ; who had doubled the value 
of those blessings, by bestowing a thankful heart to 
enjoy them, and dear friends to partake them ; who 
had rebuked the waves of the Ligurian gulf, had puri- 
fied the autumnal air of the Campagna, and had re- 
strained the avalanches of Mont Cenis. Of the Psalms, lo 
his favorite was that which represents the Ruler of 
all things under the endearing image of a shepherd, 
whose crook guides the flock safe, through gloomy 
and desolate glens, to meadows well watered and rich 
with herbage. On that goodness to which he ascribed 
all the happiness of his life, he relied in the hour of 
death with a love which casteth out fear. He died on 
the seventeenth of June, 1719. He had just entered 
on his forty-eighth year. 

His body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber,° 20 
and was borne thence to the Abbey ° at dead of night. 
The choir sang a funeral hymn. Bishop Atterbury, 
one of those Tories who had loved and honored the 
most accomplished of the Whigs, met the corpse, and 
led the procession by torchlight, round the shrine of 



140 ADDISON 

Saint Edward, and the graves of the Plantagenets, to 
the Chapel of Henry the Seventh. On the north side 
of that Chapel, in the vault of the House of Albemarle, 
the coffin of Addison lies next to the coffin of Mon- 
tague. Yet a few months ; and the same mourners 
passed again along the same aisle. The same sad 
anthem was again chanted. The same vault was 
again opened; and the coffin of Craggs was placed 
close to the coffin of Addison. 

10 Many tributes were paid to the memory of Addison ; 
but one alone is now remembered. Tickell bewailed 
his friend in an elegy which would do honor to the 
greatest name in our literature, and which unites the 
energy and magnificence of Dryden to the tenderness 
and purity of Cowper. This fine poem was prefixed 
to a superb edition of Addison's works, which was 
published, in 1721, by subscription. The names of 
the subscribers proved how widely his fame had been 
spread. That his countrymen should be eager to 

2o possess his writings, even in a costly form, is not 
wonderful. But it is wonderful that, though English 
literature was then little studied on the Continent, 
Spanish Grandees, Italian Prelates, Marshals of France, 
should be found in the list. Among the most remark- 
able names are those of the Queen of Sweden, of Prince 



ADDISON 141 

Eugene, of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the Dukes 
of Parma, Modena, and Guastalla, of the Doge of 
Genoa, of the Eegent Orleans, and of Cardinal Dubois. 
We ought to add that this edition, though eminently 
beautiful, is in some important points defective ; nor, 
indeed, do we yet possess a complete collection of 
Addison's writings. 

It is strange that neither his opulent and noble 
widow, nor any of his powerful and attached friends, 
should have thought of placing even a simple tablet, lo 
inscribed with his name, on the walls of the Abbey. 
It was not till three generations had laughed and 
wept over his pages, that the omission was supplied 
by the public veneration. At length, in our own time, 
his image, skilfully graven, appeared in Poets' Corner. 
It represents him, as we can conceive him, clad in his 
dressing gown, and freed from his wig, stepping from 
his parlor at Chelsea into his trim little garden, with 
the account of the Everlasting Club, or the Loves of 
Hilpa and Shalum, just finished for the next day's 20 
Spectator, in his hand. Such a mark of national re- 
spect was due to the unsullied statesman, to the accom- 
plished scholar, to the master of pure English elo- 
quence, to the consummate painter of life and manners. 
It was due, above all, to the great satirist, who alone 



142 ADDISON 

knew how to use ridicule without abusing it, who, 
without inflicting a wound, effected a great social re- 
form, and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a long 
and disastrous separation, during which wit had been 
led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism. 



NOTES 



This essay was published in the Edinburgh Revieio, July, 
1843. On June 15 Macaulay wrote to the editor as follows : 

" I mistrust my own judgment of what I write so much that 
I shall not be at all surprised if both you and the public think 
my paper on Addison a failure ; but I own that I am partial to 
it. It is now more than half finished. I have some researches 
to make before I proceed ; but I have all the rest in my head, 
and shall write very rapidly. I fear that I cannot contract my 
matter into less than seventy pages. You will not, I think, be 
inclined to stint me. 

" I am truly vexed to find Miss Aikin's book so very bad that 
it is impossible for us, with due regard to our own character, to 
praise it. All that I can do is to speak civilly of her writings 
generally, and to express regret that she should have been 
nodding. I have found, I will venture to say, not less than 
forty gross blunders as to matters of fact in the first volume. 
Of 'these I may, perhaps, point out eight or ten as courteously 
as the case may bear ; yet it goes much against my feelings to 
censure any woman, even with the greatest lenity." 

As far as can be judged from the sale of the separate essays, 
the article on Addison ranks fourth in popularity, being excelled 
only by the essays on Clive, Hastings, and Chatham, in the 
order named. 

143 



144 NOTES 

Page 1, line 2. franchises is used in the sense of privileges 
or immunities. 

Page 2, line 1. Knight, Bradamante. For the passage re- 
ferred to, see Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, XLV. 

1. 3. Balisarda was Rogero's enchanted sword. 

1. 18. the Laputan flapper. Gulliver'' s Travels, Laputa, 
Chapter II. In the country of Laputa the inhabitants are so 
absent-minded that they have to be constantly flapped on the 
head with a bladder in order to keep their attention aroused. 

Page 3, line 5. Raleigh, Sir Walter, (1552-1G18), the great 
statesman, explorer, and author, whose talents added so much 
to the glory of Elizabeth's reign. 

1. 6. Congreve, William, (1670-1729), an English dramatic 
poet, who achieved both fame and fortune by his productions. 

1. 6. Prior, Matthew, (1664-1721), was an English poet and 
diplomatist. 

1. 8. Theobald's, the country seat of Cecil, Elizabeth's noted 
minister. It eventually came into possession of James I., " who 
made great gardens and stocked them with all kinds of trees 
and fruits, so that every great stranger in England must needs 
go to see tlie curious knots and mazes of flowers, and the 
vineries and shrubbery." 

1. 8. Steenkirks. Lace neckcloths, very carefully adjusted, 
were worn commonly by men of fashion. At the battle of 
Steenkirk, in Holland, where William III. was defeated, when 
the brigade of the Bourbonnais was flying before the onset of 
the allies, there was no time for foppery, and the finest gentle- 
men of the court came spurring to the front of the line of battle 
with their cravats in disorder. It therefore became a fashion 



NOTES 145 

among the beauties of Paris to wear around their necks kerchiefs 
of the finest lace studiously disarranged, and these kerchiefs 
were called " steenkirks." 

1. 10. Hampton Court was built by Wolsey, and became a 
favorite residence of the English sovereigns. It was here that 
the famous conference of 160-4 was held, at which it was decided 
to make a new translation of the Bible, which afterwards became 
known as the King James Version. 

Page 4, line 13. Parnell, Thomas, (1679-1717), was a poet of 
Irish birth, who assisted Pope in his translation of Homer, and 
wrote the life of Homer which is prefixed to the Iliad. 

1. 14. Dr. Blair, a Scottish divine, who was appointed Pro- 
fessor of Rhetoric and Belles-lettres in Edinburgh University. 
He wrote and published a series of lectures on Rhetoric which 
were very popular. 

1. 15. Dr. Johnson's tragedy. The play referred to is the 
one which was first acted under the name of Mahomet and 
Irene. It had "no plot worth mentioning, no development of 
characters, no bustle or intrigue, and was totally without 
interest." For a brief though careful sketch of Johnson's life 
and writings see Edmund Gosse's History of English Literature 
in the Eighteenth Century^ pp. 282-295. 

1. 24. Button's. A noted coffee-house in London, which 
was much frequented by Addison and his friends. 

Page 5, line 21. Biographia Britannica was a collection of 
short biographical sketches, which was published in London, 
1747-1766. An enlarged edition was begun in 1778, but was 
carried only to the fifth volume. In the large list of books 
which Macaulay read while in India, in addition to all his 
other labors, he includes this ponderous work. 



146 NOTES 

1. 23. Queen's College, one of the important colleges of 
Oxford, was founded in 1340. 

Page 6, line 6. Wild of Sussex. This was a tract of land 
extending from the Straits of Dover to Beachy Head, Wild is 
from A.- 8. weald, forest. 

1. 8. Dunkirk is a fortified seaport town in the extreme 
northern part of France. It was burned by the English in 
1388, and captured by them in 1651, but was sold back to the 
French king by Charles II. in 1662. 

1. 9. Tangier is the chief port of Morocco, and is located on 
the Straits of Gibraltar. Although in summer its climate is 
very trying, in the winter it is exceptionally fine. 

1. 11. Infanta. In Spain and Portugal any princess of the 
royal blood, except the eldest daughter when heir-apparent, is 
called infanta. Catharine of Braganza was the daughter of 
John IV. of Portugal and queen of Charles II. She brought 
Tangier and Bombay in dower. 

Page 7, line 6. Tillotson, (1630-1694), was originally a strict 
Puritan, but at the Restoration he went over to the Established 
Church, and was given numerous honors. In 1689 he was 
appointed by William a member of a commission to revise 
the English liturgy, and in 1691 was made Archbishop of 
Canterbury. 

1. 11. Charter House, (a corruption of Chartreuse), was a 
hospital and school in London, which was founded in 1691. 
The school is for the benefit of " the sons of poor gentlemen to 
whom the charge of education is too onerous." Among the 
eminent men educated there were Addison, John Wesley, 
George Grote, Bishop Thirlwall, and Thackeray. 



NOTES 147 

Page 8, line 7. Magdalene (pronounced inaudlin) College. 
See Macaulay's History of England^ II., Cli. VII., p. 222, for 
a brilliant description of this college. 

1. 14. his Chancellor. The infamous Judge Jeffries. 

1. 19. a president. John Hough, a distinguished bishop of 
the English Church. 

1. 16. a Papist. Anthony Farmer. 

Page 9, line 17. Demies. The corporation or society of 
Magdalene College consisted of a president, of thirty scholars 
called demies, and of a train of chaplains, clerks, and choristers. 

Page 10, line 12. Lucretius, (97-53 b.c), was a Roman, and 
the greatest poet of rationalism the world has ever produced. 
His one great poem was the De Berwn Natura, which is called 
the greatest didactic poem ever written. Professor Wilkinson 
says of it : 

" It was almost an exact opposite to the object of the great 
poem of Milton. That object was to explore eternity and 
vindicate the ways of God to man. This object was to explore 
the universe and vindicate man against the ways of gods, — 
gods that were no gods. The audacious sublimity, the sublime 
audacity of their several attempts, seem to ally the two poets in 
genius while separating them thus widely in aim." 

Lucretius is known as the great apostle of atheism of ancient 
times. 

1. 13. Catullus, Gains Valerius, (87-54 b.c), was a Roman 
lyric poet, and was chiefly noted for the grace and beauty of 
his style. 

1. 13. Claudian was a Roman epic poet, and is regarded 
as the last of the classical Latin poets. He was born at about 
the end of the fourth century. 



148 NOTES 

1. 13. Prudentius, Aurelius Clemens, (348-405), was a Roman 
poet, who devoted himself almost exclusively to theological 
studies and religious poetry. 

1. 20. Buchanan, George, (1506-1582), was a classical scholar 
of great repute. He was the tutor of Mary, Queen of Scots, and 
afterwards preceptor of the young king, James VI., of Scot- 
land, who succeeded to the English throne upon the death of 

Elizabeth. 

Page 11, line 16. Metamorphoses. The best-known work of 
the great Latin poet, Publius Ovidius Naso, better known as 
Ovid. 

1. 20. Statius, Publius Papinius, (45-96), was a Roman 
author and poet. 

1. 24. For the myth of Pentheus see Gayley's Classic 3Iijths. 

Page 12, line 1. Theocritus was a Greek poet, who flourished 
in the first half of the third century b.c. 

1. 1. Euripides, (485-406 b.c. ), was the third of the great trio 
of Greek dramatists, the other two being Sophocles and ^schylus. 

1. 10. Ausonius, Decimus Magnus, (310-394), and Manilius, 
Marcus, who lived during the age of Augustus, were both minor 
Latin poets. 

1. 20. Polybius, (205-123 b.c.) , was a noted Greek historian. 

1. 20. Livy, (59 b.c.-17 a.d.), was the greatest of Roman 
historians. His life was devoted to the preparation of a history 
of Rome from its foundation to 9 b.c, in one hundred and 
forty-two books, of which only thirty -five have come down to us. 
While not always accurate, his narrative is fluent and vividly 
picturesque, and is frequently brilliant and dramatic. 

1. 21. Stilus Italicus, (25-101), wrote an epic poem in 



NOTES 149 

seventeen books on the Second Punic War. It is the longest 
and probably the dullest of all Latin poems. 

1. 22. Plutarch, (66-120), was a great Greek biographer. The 
most famous of his works is a series of Parallel Lives, forty- 
six lives in twenty-three pairs, a Greek biography being set over 
against a Roman. 

1. 24. Atticus, Titus Pomponius, (109-32 b.c), was an ac- 
complished Roman author and historian. 

Page 13, line 2. Lucan, (39-65), was a nephew of Seneca. 
Only a portion of one of his works is extant, Pharsalia, or De 
Bello Civili, a heroic poem of ten books treating of the civil 
wars between Caesar and Pompey. 

1. 5. Pindar, ("The Tlieban Eagle"), was the greatest of 
Greek lyric poets. 

1. 5. Callimachus was a writer of hymns and epigrams. 

1. 7. Horace, (65-8 b.c), was the greatest of Roman lyric 
poets. His works are more widely read to-day and more gener- 
ally admired than those of any other Latin poet. 

1. 8. Juvenal, (56-140), was a Roman satirist. He wrote 
sixteen satires in heroic hexameters, which were full of stern 
indignation against the vices, follies, and crimes of Roman life. 
His descriptions were vivid, realistic, and oftentimes coarse. 

Page 14, line 5. Cock-Lane ghost. In Cock-Lane, Stock- 
well, in 1762, certain knockings were heard, which Mr. Parsons, 
the owner, declared proceeded from the ghost of Mrs. Kent, who 
(he wished people to suppose) had been murdered by her hus- 
band. All London was agog with the story ; but it was found 
out that the knockings were produced by a girl employed by 
Parsons, and were made by rapping on a board which she took 
into her bed. 



150 NOTES 

1. 6. Ireland's Vortigern. William Henry Ireland, (1777- 
1805), was an author who was noted chiefly for his forgeries. 
Having made a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon he forged a lease 
containing the pretended signature of Shakespeare, which he said 
he had discovered among some old law papers. He afterwards 
executed other similar forgeries, among which was Vortigern, a 
tragedy purporting to have been written by Shakespeare. Be- 
sides this he wrote Henry II. and attributed it also to Shake- 
speare, but the true origin of both of these plays was soon 
discovered. 

1. 7. the Thundering Legion. This name was given to a 
legion of Christians who served under the Roman emperor, 
Marcus Aurelius. The tradition is in brief that once while on 
the march they were so tormented with thirst that they prayed 
to God for rain. The prayer was answered by a terrific thun- 
derstorm which not only enabled them to quench their thirst, 
but also destroyed a large number of the enemy. 

1. 8. Agbarus. Eusebius states that this king was taken 
sick and wrote a letter to Jesus begging him to come and heal 
him. Christ answered by a letter, saying that he would send 
one of his disciples. 

1. 21. Boyle, Charles, (1676-1731), was an author, soldier, 
and statesman, but was more distinguished as a soldier than as 
a writer. He edited and published the so-called Epistles of 
Fhalaris. 

1. 21. Blackmore, Sir Richard, (1650-1729), was a physician 
and a voluminous writer of theological and poetical works of 
little value or interest. 

Page 15, line 11. Bentley, Richard, (1662-1742), was the 
greatest critic and classical scholar of his age. 



NOTES 151 

1. 22. His lines on the Barometer and the Bowling Green. 
Johnson says: "Three of his Latin poems are upon subjects 
on which, perhaps, he would not have ventured to have written 
in his own language. The Battle of the Cranes and Pygmies ; 
the Barometer ; and a Bowling Green. When the matter is 
low and scanty, a dead language, in which nothing is mean be- 
cause nothing is familiar, affords great conveniences ; and by 
the sonorous magnificence of Roman syllables, the writer con- 
ceals penury of thought and want of novelty often from the 
reader and often from himself." 

1. 24. Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris. Phalaris, 
who was proverbially the most cruel tyrant known to antiquity, 
was ruler of Agrigentum in Sicily in the middle of the sixth 
century b.c. Little is known of him historically, though his 
ingenious cruelty forms the subject of many fables and stories. 
The famous Epistles, one hundred and forty-eight in number, 
first printed in Venice in 1498, and afterwards often reprinted 
and translated, give quite another picture of his character, and 
were read and generally believed to be authentic until Bentley 
proved them spurious in what Porson styles "that immortal 
dissertation " to which no answer was or could be given. 

Page 16, lines 18-21. These verses occur in the Battle of the 
Cranes and Pygmies and may be translated as follows : — 

"And now into the midst of the squadrons the bold leader 
of the Pygmies forces his way, who, awe-inspiring in his majesty 
and commanding in his movements, excels all the rest with his 
gigantic form, and rises to the height of the elbow." 

1. 25. coffee-houses round Drury Lane theatre. Before the 
introduction of newspapers, coffee-houses were important cen- 
tres or sources of information, where people assembled to learn 
the news and discuss the important questions of the day. 



152 NOTES 

The following were among the most noted resorts of this 
period .- — 

Garraway's, which was located in Cornhill, was much fre- 
quented by those who were engaged in mercantile transactions. 
It is said that tea was sold here first in England. 

The Grecian, so called after the Greek by whom it was kept, 
was the common resort of scholars and students. 

Button's was the favorite resort of Addison and his cronies. 

Jonathan's was frequented by stock-jobbers and speculators. 

The October Club was a parliamentary club formed in 1690. 
It was named for the October ale for which it was famed. 

Child's was an establishment in St. Paul's churchyard, much 
frequented by professional men. 

St. James' was a famous Whig resort. 

White's Chocolate House was noted as a resort of gamblers 
and sporting men. For a description of the origin and growth 
of the Coffee-house, see Macaulay's England^ /., Ch. III., p. 286. 

Page 17, line 3. Dryden, (1631-1700), was an English poet 
and dramatist. He was appointed poet-laureate in 1668. 

1. 9. Congreve, William, (1670-1729), was an English dra- 
matic poet, of whom Donald Mitchell says : " Congreve was in 
his way an important man — immensely admired. Voltaire 
said he was the best comedy writer England had ever known ; 
and when he came to London this keen-witted Frenchman 
(who rarely visited) went to see Mr. Congreve at his rooms in 
the Strand. Nothing was too good for Mr. Congreve ; he had 
patronage and great gifts ; it seemed always to be raining 
roses upon his head. The work he did was not great work, but 
it was exquisitely done." 

1. 11. Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax, (1661-1715), was 
Chancellor of the Exchequer under William III. He was a 



NOTES 153 

noted statesman and a patron of letters. See Macaulay's Eng- 
land. 

1. 20. Newdigate and Seatonian prizes were prizes given at 
Oxford and Cambridge respectively for English verse. The 
Newdigate prize was not to be awarded to a poem which 
exceeded fifty lines in length, and the Seatonian prize was for 
the best English poem upon a subject "to be most conducive 
to the honor of the supreme Being and the recommendation of 
virtue." 

1. 21. The heroic couplet was iambic pentameter, a measure 
which lends itself to a clear, terse, and epigrammatic style. As 
Macaulay says, it was mechanical, and was soon abandoned. 
Lowell called it "the rocking-horse measure." 

Page 18, line 16. Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, (1648- 
1680), was a favorite at the court of Charles II., and was noted 
for his wit and his vices. He wrote some poems and letters 
which were both vulgar and licentious. Taine says of him : 
" His manners were those of a lawless and wretched mounte- 
bank. ... He spent his time between gossiping with the 
maids of honor, broils with men of letters, the receiving of 
insult, and the giving of blows." 

1. 17. Marvel, Andrew, (1621-1678), was a friend and as- 
sistant of Milton in the Latin secretaryship. He wrote politi- 
cal satires and some very sweet and beautiful verse. 

1. 17. Oldham, John, (1653-1683), was a satirical poet. Hal- 
lam says of him : " His poems are spirited and pointed, and he 
ranks after Dryden." 

1. 19. Ben Jonson, (1573-1637), was probably the greatest 
dramatist, next to Shakespeare, of the Elizabethan Age. His 
best-known works are Every 3Ian in Ms Humor and Every Man 



154 NOTES 

out of his Humor. He was made poet-laureate in 1619. He 
was buried in Westminster Abbey, wliere liis tombstone bears 
the inscription, "Brave Ben Jonson." 

1. 19. Hoole, Jolm, (1727-1803), was an English dramatist 
and translator. 

1. 21. Brunei, Sir Marc Isambard, (1769-1849) , was noted as a 
skilful engineer and the author of a number of ingenious inven- 
tions. He invented a machine for turning out block pulleys, 
which are referred to in the text. He planned and constructed 
the first tunnel under the Thames. 

Page 19, lines 4-12. This selection is taken from Jonson's The 
Poetaster., V., 1. It is a translation of the uEneid, IV., 178-183. 

1. 16. Tasso, Torquato, (1544-1595), was an Italian poet 
and the author of the great epic poem Gerusalemme Liherata. 
The selection in the text is taken from this work, XIV., 58. 
It will be interesting to compare this translation with the 
standard one of J. H. Wiffen, in which the passage reads : 

" O thou, whoe'er thou art, whom sweet self-will, 
Or chance, or idlesse to this region guides! 
No greater wonder in design or skill 

Can the world show than that this islet hides ; 
Pass o'er and see." 

Page 20, line 5. Duke, Richard, (1655-1711), an English theo- 
logian and poet of very doubtful ability. 

1. 6. Stepney, George, (1663-1707), Johnson says of him: 
" He apparently professed himself a poet, and added his name 
to those of other wits in the version of Juvenal; but he is a 
very licentious translator, and does not recompense his neglect 
of the author by beauties of his own. In his original poems, 
now and then, a happy line may, perhaps, be found and, now 



NOTES 155 

and then, a short composition may give pleasure. But there 
is, in the whole, little either of the grace of wit or the vigor of 
nature." 

1. 6. Granville, George, (1667-1735), was a statesman and a 
writer of some repute, but is now forgotten. 

1. 6. Walsh, William, (1663-1709). Johnson says of him: 
"He is known more by his familiarity with greater men than 
by anything done or written by himself." 

1. 23. "After his bees." The subject of the Fourth Georgic 
is the keeping of bees. 

Page 21, line 17. Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, (1637- 
1706), was a noted courtier and patron of letters. Among the 
authors who profited by his generosity was Dryden. He wrote 
a number of satires and songs which were much admired. 

1. 20. See Basselas, Prince of Abyssinia, the most noted of 
the works of Samuel Johnson. It was written in a week's 
time to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. 

Page 22, line 17. Somers, John, (1651-1761), was one of 
the most noted scholars and statesmen of the times. He was 
the leader of the Whig party, and during the reign of William 
III. occupied many high official positions, and was finally 
appointed Lord Chancellor in 1697. 

Page 23, line 25. Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, 
(1661-1748), and Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, (1660- 
1718), were both noted Whig statesmen and patrons of letters. 
The leading statesmen of Addison's time were accustomed to 
extend their patronage to writers of prominence, and thus put 
them under obligations which they could not fail to acknow- 
ledge. 



156 NOTES 

Page 24, line 1. Prior, Matthew, (1664-1721), was an Eng- 
lish poet and diplomatist. 

1. 4, Both the great chiefs of the Ministry. Somers and 
Montague. 

1. 11. peace of Ryswick. A treaty of peace was signed at 
this place between France and the allies, Germany, England, 
Holland, and Spain, September 20, 1697. 

Page 25, line 22. a toast. A lady whose health is drunk in 
honor or respect. 

Page 26, line 1. the Kit Cat Club was one of the most 
famous clubs of this period. It dates from 1703, and was made 
up of about forty gentlemen of rank and ability who were in- 
terested in promoting the Protestant succession in the House of 
Hanover. Among its members were the Dukes of Marlborough 
and Devonshire, Lord Halifax, Sir Robert Walpole, Congreve, 
Granville, and Addison. Its name is said to be derived from a 
noted pastry cook, Christopher Catt, who lived near the tavern 
where they met in King Street, AVestminster, and supplied the 
members with pies. The association lasted about twenty years. 

1. 10. Racine, Jean Baptiste, (1639-1699), was one of the 
greatest of French dramatists. In his earlier life he gave him- 
self up to pleasure and dissipation, but towards the end of his 
life his moral attitude changed completely, so that he even con- 
templated becoming a Carthusian monk. 

1. 12. Dacier, Andr^, (1651-1722), was a French scholar, 
librarian of the king, and translator of Plutarch. An interest- 
ing passage from one of Addison's letters in reference to this 
translation of Plato is found in Kemble's State Papers and Let- 
ters^ page 237. 



NOTES 157 

" As for the present state of learning there is nothing pub- 
lished here which has not in it an air of devotion. Dacier has 
been forced to prove his Plato a very good Christian before he 
ventures to translate him, and has so far complied with the taste 
of the age that his whole book is overrun with texts of scripture, 
and the notion of pre-exisfcence, supposed to be stolen from two 
verses out of the Prophets." — Addison to Halifax, Paris, Oc- 
tober, 1699. 

Dacier was, at this time, making an effort to show a relation- 
ship between the doctrines of Athanasius, the great Alexandrian 
bishop, (246-273), and the systems of Plato, the greatest of the 
Greek philosophers, and one whose works have exerted no little 
influence upon Christian theology. 

1. 21: Blois was a beautiful city one hundred and twelve 
miles southwest of Paris. It was once the favorite residence of 
the kings of France. 

Page 27, line 2. Joseph Spence, (1699-1668), was an English 
author and critic. 

1. 12. The Guardian was published in the interval between 
the suspension of the Specta'or and the resumption of its publi- 
cation. The first number appeared March 12, 1713, and the 
last was published October 1 of the same year. 

1. 21. Malbranche, Nicolas, (1638-1715), was a French 
philosopher. 

1. 21. Boileau, Nicolas, (1636-1711), was a French poet and 
satirist. 

1. 23. Newton, Sir Isaac, (1642-1727), was perhaps the most 
illustrious of English philosophers and scientists. Sir James 
Mcintosh says: "Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, and Newton are 



158 NOTES 

four names beyond competition superior to any that the Conti- 
nent can put against them." Tope wrote : 

" Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night : 
God said ' Let Newton be ' aud all was light." 

1. 24. Hobbes, Thomas, (1588-1679), was an English philoso- 
pher. He wrote many works, but probably the best known of 
them all is tlie Leviathan^ published in 1051, which contains the 
complete system of his philosophy. 

Page 28, line 6. the Academy. The first institution of this 
kind in France was founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635. It 
was formed for the purpose of refining the French language and 
style, and to that end published a dictionary of the national 
language in 1694. It consisted of forty members, and a place 
among them was eagerly sought as one of the highest honors 
which could be attained by an author. It was reorganized in 
1795 and again in 1806 by Napoleon so as to be much more 
comprehensive in its scope and design, and to-day membership 
in the Academy is the most distinguished honor to which a 
French scholar or scientist can aspire. 

1. 17. Sir Joshua Reynolds, (1723-1792), was a distinguished 
painter. He was the central figure in a number of literary and 
political clubs, and was noted as a host. He was the first presi- 
dent of the Royal Academy. 

1. 18. Mrs. Thrale was celebrated in her youth as " the 
beautiful Miss Salisbury." Dr. Johnson was an inmate of her 
family from 1766 to 1781 at Southwark and at Streatham. 
According to Dr. Johnson: ''If not the wisest woman in the 
world, she was undoubtedly one of the wisest." See Macaulay's 
on Johnson. 

1. 18. Wieland, Christoph Martin, (1733-1813). 



NOTES 159 

1.19. Lessing, Gotthold Epbraim, (1729-1781). It is said of 
him: "Tlie principal characteristic of Lessing's mind was his 
pure and passionate love of truth. By his heroic struggle for 
the possession of truth he became the greatest critic of modern 
times, the reformer in literature, and one of the foremost liber- 
ators of the human mind not only for the eighteenth century 
but for all time." 

1. 22. Absalom and Ahitophel was a political satire by 
Dryden. 

Page 30, line 5. PoUio, Gains Asinius, (76 b.c.-5 a.d.), 
was a Roman poet, historian, and critic who enjoyed the friend- 
ship of Vergil and Horace. He also excelled as an orator, and 
was sometimes ranked next to Cicero. It is difficult for a mod- 
ern student to see any just grounds for his criticism of Livy's 
style. 

1. 18. Erasmus, Desiderius, (1467-1536), a celebrated scholar 
and philosopher, was born in Holland. He established the 
reputation of being the most eminent scholar and witty writer 
of the times. He was a friend of Luther, and did much to 
forward the Reformation in its first stages, but he afterwards 
dissented from some of Luther's doctrines and was denounced 
by him. 

1. 18. Fracastorius, Hieronymus, (1483-1553), was a learned 
physician and poet of Verona. 

1. 19. Robertson, William, (1721-1793), was a native of Mid- 
Lothian, Scotland, and was noted for his advanced scholarship 
and as a historian. 

1. 25. alcaics of Gray. Alcaics are lyric poems written in a 
peculiar measure first used by Alcseus, a Greek poet, who flour- 
ished about 600 B.C. 



160 NOTES 

1. 25. Thomas Gray, (1716-1771), was an English poet, and is 
best known for his " Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." 

I. 25. elegiacs : a style of verse commonly used by the Greeks 
and Romans in writing elegies. It consists of couplets of alter- 
nate hexameters and pentameters. 

Page 31, line 1. Vincent Bourne, (1695-1747), was an usher 
in Westminster School, wh6 was admired for his Latin poetry. 
Cowper, who was his pupil in Westminster, says of him, "I 
think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Au- 
sonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not 
at all inferior to him.' ' 

II. 4-8. '' Do not think, however, that I desire to criticize the 
Latin verses of your illustrious academicians which you have 
sent me. I have found them very beautiful and worthy of 
Vida and Sannazar, but not of Horace and of Vergil." Vida 
was a Latin poet of the Renaissance, who was noted for the 
smoothness of his style more than for the originality of his 
thought. Sannazar was a contemporary of Vida. 

I. 12. Fere Fraguier's epigrams. Pfere Eraguier, (1666-1728), 
was a French savant and writer. An epigram is a short poem 
of a pointed or antithetical character. The name was given by 
the Greeks to a poetic inscription on a public monument. 

II. 21-23, " Why do you bid me, Muse, born of a Sicam- 
brian father far this side of the Alps, to stammer again in Latin 
numbers ? " 

1. 25. 3Iachince Gesticulantes, Gerano-PijgmcEomachia were 
the names of two of Addison's Latin poems. 

Page 32, line 17. the Spectator was the well-known period- 
ical which succeeded the Tatler, under the joint editorship of 
Steele and Addison. 



n-ot:es 161 

Page 83, line 1. Dauphin was the name given to the oldest 
son of the king of France, who was the heir apparent to the 
throne. 

1. 3. States-General was an assembly composed of repre- 
sentatives of the nation. The national assemblies of both 
France and Holland were known by this name. Here the ref- 
erence is to Holland. 

Page 34, line 9. The stanzas of the hymn which refer to 
this incident are as follows : 

" Think, O my soul, devoutly think, 
How with affrighted eyes 
Thou saw'st the wide extended deep 
In all its horrors rise. 

" Confusion dwelt in every face, 
And fear in every heart, 
When waves on waves, and gulphs in gulphs, 
O'ereame the pilot's art. 

■'■' Yet then from all my griefs, O Lord, 
Thy mercy set me free, 
Whilst in the confidence of prayer 
My soul took hold on thee. 



" The storm was laid, the winds retired, 
Obedient to thy will ; 
The sea that roared at thy command 
At thy command was still. 

" In midst of dangers, fears and death, 
Thy goodness I'll adore. 
And praise thee for thy mercies 
And humbly hope for more. 

M 



162 NOTES 

" My life, if thou preserv'st my lif9, 
Thy sacrifice shall be ; 
And death, if death must be my doom, 
Shall join my soul to thee." 

1. 14. Genoa was tinder the rule of France from 1380 to 
1528, when Andrea Doria threw off the French domination and 
restored the old form of government, under hereditary rulers 
known as doges, which endured until the French Revolution. 

1. 17. Book of Gold. The state register of nobility. 

1. 24. Lake Benacus. The modern Lago di Garda, the larg- 
est and one of the most beautiful of the lakes of northern 
Italy. On account of its fine climate and the beauty of its 
scenery it has been a popular resort from the earliest times. 

Page 35, line 13. Tasso, Bernardo, (1493-1569), was a noted 
Italian poet. Observe the anachronism. 

Page 36, line 5. San Marino is the oldest and smallest inde- 
pendent republic in the world. It is situated in eastern central 
Italy, includes an area of thirty-two square miles, and has a 
population of about 8,000. 

1. 18. St. Peter's is the celebrated basilica in Rome, and 
is said to be the largest church in Christendom. It was be- 
gun in 1450, and consecrated by Pope Urban VIII. in 1626. 
Raphael had charge of the building for some time, and Michael 
Angelo designed the dome. 

1. 19. the Pantheon is the oldest and most perfectly pre- 
served of all the ancient structures in Rome. It was built by 
Marcus Agrippa, 27 n.c, and was restored by Severus and 
Caracalla, 202 a.d. It was transformed into a Christian church 
in 607 A.D. 



NOTES 163 

1. 20. Holy Week is the last week in Lent, and is sometimes 
known as the " !Still Week." 

Page 37, line 15. Passtum was an ancient Roman town sit- 
uated about forty miles southeast of Naples. Three very an- 
cient Doric temples still remain in a fair state of preservation. 

1. 20. Salvator Rosa was a celebrated Italian painter. 

1. 21. Vico, Giovanni Battista, was an Italian jurist, pliilos- 
opher and critic. 

1. 25. Posilipo. The tunnel of Posilipo, 2200 feet in length, 
on the road from Naples to Pozzuoli, was built about thirty-six 
years before the Christian era and is still in use. 

Page 88, line 2. Capreae is an island at the entrance of the 
Bay of Naples, On it is located a famous cavern known as 
the Grotto of the Nymphs. The infamous Roman emperor, 
Tiberius, spent the last ten years of his life on this island, and 
built twelve villas or palaces, of which the ruins still remain. 

1. 7. Philip the Fifth, the grandson of Louis XIV. of 
France, was declared heir to the Spanish throne by the will 
of Charles II., who died childless, Nov. 1, 1700. 

1. 15. Jacobitism. The Jacobites were partisans of King 
James II., who was dethroned in 1688. They maintained a 
party organization, and continued to plot for the return of the 
Stuarts for a number of years. 

1. 15. Freeholder was published from September 23, 1715, to 
June 26, 1716. Addison contributed to it many vigorous arti- 
cles in support of the government. 

1. 15. The Tory fox-hunter is a delightful picture of a 
partisan politician. He appears first in No. 22 of the Free- 
holder, and again in Nos. 44 and 47. 



164 NOTES 

1. 23. tomb of Misenus. See the Eueid, Bk. VI. 

Page 39, line 4. hot and sickly months. The summer m 
Rome is very unhealthful, especially for foreigners. 

1. 20. Duke of Shrewsbury was Lord Chamberlain to 
James II., and an active promoter of the Revolution of 1689. 
He was Secretary of State under William III. and a member of 
the Privy Council in the reign of Anne. Macaulay says of him : 
"The character of this man is a curious study. ... He was, 
with great abilities, a weak man, and, though endowed with 
many amiable and attractive qualities, could not be called an 
honest man." Macaulay 's History of England, Vol. III., 
Ch. 15. 

Page 40, line 8. Museum. Reference is probably made to 
the Palazzo degli Affizi, which contains a world-famous collec- 
tion of statuary in marble and bronze, cameos, and pictures, 
among them the Venus by Titian and the Holy Family by 
Michael Angelo. 

1. 9. the Vatican, the well-known palace of the Popes, was 
built by Pope Leo IV., about 850 a.d. It is made up of a great 
mass of buildings fronting on twenty different courts, and con- 
tains about eleven thousand rooms. It contains a great many 
celebrated wall paintings, an Etruscan Museum, a few great 
pictures, and the largest . collection of classical statuary in 
Europe. 

1. 18. fiercer conflict : The war of the Spanish Succession, 
which broke out in 1701. 

1. 13. Prince Eugene was a Frenchman, but he entered the 
Austrian service early in his life and gained the reputation of 
being a brave soldier and an able general. In the war of the 
Spanish Succession he first commanded the Austrian army in 



NOTJ^JS 165 

Italy, where he was opposed by the French army under Marshal 
Catinat, whom he surprised and took captive. 

1. 15. The faithless ruler of Savoy : Victor Amadeus VI. 
In this war he first supported Louis but afterwards turned 
against him. His defection was rewarded at the close of the 
war by the acquisition of the island of Sicily and the title of 
king. 

1. 19. the Grand Alliance was the second against France. 
It was composed of P^ngland, the Netherlands, Germany and 
Prussia, Austria, and Portugal. 

1. 23. Mont Cenis is a mountain pass of the Alps between 
Italy and France. Napoleon built a carriage road over it in 
1803-1810 to connect the two countries. It is now pierced by 
a tunnel which was opened in 1871. 

Page 44, line 8. Lord Treasurer Godolphin, (1G50-1713), was 
a noted statesman of this period. He held many high positions 
under James, William, and Anne, and had decided talents for 
public business but no political or moral principles. When 
chamberlain to the Queen of James II. he conformed to the 
Roman Catholic rites, and was Protestant, Tory, or Whig, as 
would best serve his interests. 

1. 8. Captain General Marlborough. John Churchill, first 
Duke of Marlborough, (1650-1722), was one of the most noted 
of English generals. In the war of the Spanish Succession he 
held the chief command of the allied forces and won a series of 
extraordinary victories, among which were Malplaquet, Oude- 
narde, Blenheim, and many others. His daughter married 
Godolphin. 

1. 16. Dissenters are English Protestants who differ in their 
views from the doctrines of the Established Church. In 1689, 



166 NOTES 

by the Act of Toleration, they obtained legal security in cele- 
brating their worship. 

Page 45, line 17. Mr. Canning, (1770-1827), was a noted 
statesman and orator. In 1826 he was Secretary of Foreign 
Affairs in the cabinet of Lord Liverpool. " He advocated a 
liberal and progressive policy and asserted the principle of non- 
interference in the internal affairs of foreign states. . . . At 
home his influence was seen in the new strength gained by the 
question of Catholic Emancipation." Greeii's Shorter History, 
p. 838. 

His policy also inaugurated the movement which brought 
about the repeal of the Corn Laws. 

1. 19. Earl of Nottingham was Secretary of State under 
William and Mary, and also under Anne. Earl of Jersey was 
Secretary of State under William. 

1. 20. Lord Eldon, (1751-1838), was Lord Chancellor of Eng- 
land from 1801 to 1827, with the exception of one year. Lord 
Westmoreland, (1759-1841), was Lord of the Frivy Seal for many 
years. 

1. 23. Somers, John, (1651-1716), was successively Solicitor 
General, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Lord Chancellor 
during the reign of William III. He was also chairman of the 
committee which drew up the Declaration of Right. 

1. 23. Halifax, Charles Montague, Earl of, (1661-1715). 

1. 23. Sunderland, Robert Spencer, second Earl of, (1640- 
1722), was Secretary of State from 1706 to 1710. 

1. 23. Cowper, William, (1664-1723), was leader of the Whig 
party in the House of Commons and was appointed Lord Chan- 
cellor in 1705. 



NOTES 167 

Page 46, line 5. Blenheim was a small village in Bavaria. 
The allied armies under Marlborough and Prince Eugene, num- 
bering about 52,000 men, attacked the French and Bavarians, 
who slightly outnumbered them. The victory was a decisive 
one. 

1. 12. Act of Settlement was the act by which the crown 
was limited to the House of Hanover, and all Roman Catholics 
were excluded from the throne. 

1. 20. Newmarket is the seat of the most famous race-courses 
in England. Godolphin is said to have possessed an inordinate 
fondness for racing and gambling. 

Page 48, line 25. similitude of the Angel. The lines referred 
to are the following : 

" 'Twas then great Marlbro's mighty soul was prov'd, 
That, in the shock of charging hosts unmov'd, 
Amidst confusion, horror, and despair, 
Examin'd all the dreadful scenes of war ; 
In peaceful thought the field of death survey'd, 
To fainting squadrons sent timely aid, 
Inspir'd repuls'd battalions to engage. 
And taught the doubtful battle where to rage. 
So when an angel by divine command 
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, 
Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past. 
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast, 
And pleas'd th' Almighty's orders to perform, 
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm." 

Page 50, line 23. Lifeguardsman Shaw was a pugilist who 
gained considerable renown for the bravery which he dis^Dlayed 
at the battle of Waterloo. 

Page 51, line 1. the Mamelukes formed the ruling power in 



168 NOTES 

Egypt the most of the time from 1250 to 1798. They were 
originally Tartars and Turks who were bought by the Sultan of 
Egypt from Genghis Khan and were held for a time as slaves, 
but they soon overthrew the dominion of their masters and 
formed a dynasty of their own. They considered themselves 
invincible in war, but were defeated and nearly exterminated 
by Napoleon in the battle of the Pyramids. Mourad Bey was 
their leader. 

1. 17. The characters mentioned here should be familiar 
to every student. The incidents are taken from Silius's epic 
on the Punic War. 

Page 62, line 4. William III. defeated James II. in the Battle 
of the Boyne River, in eastern Ireland, July 1, 1690. 

1. 5. John Philips, (1676-1708), was styled by Macaulay " the 
poet of the English vintage." In all his poems save Blenheim 
he celebrates the virtues of tobacco. He wrote a long poem, in 
imitation of the Georgics, on "Cider." 

1. 6. The Splendid Shilling was a mock-heroic poem in imita- 
tion of the verse of Paradise Lost. He also sought to imitate 
the same poem in Blenheim. Johnson says of this attempt : 

" In Blenheim he imitates Milton's numbers, indeed, but 
imitates them very injudiciously. Deformity is easily copied ; 
and whatever there is in Milton which the reader wishes away, 
all that is obsolete, peculiar or licentious is accumulated with 
great care by Philips." 

1. 11. Tallard was the French marshal who commanded at 
Blenheim. 

Page 54, line 16. Victor Amadeus. See note to page 40, 
line 15. 



NOTES 169 

I. 19, The Rutulians were a people of ancient Italy who 
inhabited the coast of Latimn. They were overcome by the 
Trojans under Eneas. 

1. 22. Empress Faustina was the daughter of Antoninus 
Pius and the wife of Marcus Aurelius. She died 175 a.d. 

Page 55, lines 14-16. Dante and Petrarch were world-re- 
nowned i3oets of Italy. Boccaccio was widely known as a poet 
and novelist. Boiardo and Berni were somewhat obscure poets. 
Lorenzo de' Medici was one of the greatest of the rulers of 
Florence and raised that city to a great height of power and 
opulence. He was the father of Pope Leo IX. and was himself 
a poet. He was known as "the Magnificent." Machiavelli 
was a Florentine of great ability and prominence, a contempo- 
rary of Lorenzo. He is best known as the author of II Principe, 
which has made his name a synonym of evil in politics. See 
Macaulay's essay on Machiavelli. 

1. 17. Ariosto was an Italian poet whose best-known work is 
Orlando Fiwioso, which has for its subject the romantic history 
of Charlemagne and his peers. 

1. 18. Tasso was an Italian epic and lyric poet. Ferrara 
was the home of both Tasso and Ariosto. 

1, 20. Valerius Flaccus was a Roman epic poet who flourished 
in the reign of Vespasian. He wrote Argonautica, which is a 
poem on the adventures of the Argonauts. 

1. 20. Sidonius Apollinarius, (430-480), was a Latin poet 
and ecclesiastic. 

1. 21. Ticin. The river Ticinus which gave its name to a 
famous battle in the Second Punic War. 



170 NOTES 

1. 23. Martial, Marcus Valerius, (40-104 [?]), was a Roman 
poet and wit. About 1500 of liis short poems are still extant, 

1. 24. Santa Croce was a famous church of the Black Friars 
in Florence. As a favorite place of interment for the Floren- 
tines it has often been called the Westminster Abbey of that city. 

Page 56, line 1. Spectre Huntsman is the subject of a tale 
in Boccaccio's Decameron. 

\. 1. Francesca da Rimini lived at Rimini, and the house in 
which she lived still stands. For her pathetic story, see Dante's 
Inferno, Canto V. 

1.7. Vincenzio Filicaja, (1G42-1707). The translation of one 
of his sonnets U Italia was introduced by Byron into the fourth 
canto of Childe Harold, which begins " Italia, 0, Italia ! " It 
is said of him that " he died deeply lamented by rich and poor 
alike and beloved by God and man." 

1. 16. Macaulay brings out very strikingly in this passage 
Addison's devotion to classic literature and neglect of modern 
Italian writers. The most of the classic authors enumerated are 
of minor rank, while the Italian writers are world renowned. 

1. 18. Opera of Rosamond was inscribed to the Duchess of 
Marlborough. The scene was laid in Woodstock Park in the 
reign of Henry II. 

1. 25. Rowe, Nicholas, (1674-1718), was the author of a num- 
ber of successful plays. He was made poet-laureate by George I. 

Page 57, line 4. Dr. Arne, (1710-1770), was a celebrated 
musical composer. He wrote the music for Milton's Comus, 
and also for the well-known song, " Rule Britannia." 

1. 19. The order of the garter was the most illustrious order 



NOTES 171 

of English knighthood. It is supposed to have been founded by 
Edward III. in 1344:. The incident whicli led to its formation 
is too well known to need repetition. Membership in the order 
is restricted to the sovereign, the Prince of Wales, and such 
other princes as may be chosen, and twenty-five regular 
knights. Others may be admitted only by special statute. 

1. 20. The Electoral Prince of Hanover, afterwards George 
I. of England, was the great-grandson, on his mother's side, of 
James I. of England. 

Page 58, line 5. Harley, Robert, Earl of Oxford, (1661-1724), 
on his first entrance into Parliament was a radical Whig, but 
gradually changed his views until he reached the opposite ex- 
treme of Toryism. He was for a time a great favorite of Queen 
Anne, and very powerful in political circles. He was, however, 
regarded with suspicion by her successor, George I., and was 
impeached of high treason, but was acquitted and afterwards 
lived in retirement. He accumulated a large collection of 
books and manuscripts, which became known as the Harleian 
collection. 

1. 8. Duchess of Marlborough was an intimate friend of 
Queen Anne, over whom she exerted a powerful influence. 

1. 9. The Captain General. The Duke of Marlborough. 

1. 15. Sacheverell, Henry, D. D., (1672-1724), was a pulpit 
orator who denounced toleration to dissenters, attacked Low 
Churchmen, and declared that the Church was in danger on 
account of 'its leniency. He was impeached by the House of 
Commons for these utterances, and was sentenced to three 
years' suspension from preaching, and his offending sermons 
were ordered burned by the common hangman. 

1. 21. Wharton, Thomas, (1640-1715), was a Whig statesman, 



172 NOTES 

who took a prominent part in opposition to Charles II., and was 
one of the first to join the ranlvs of the Prince of Orange. He 
held a number of important official positions, but was notorious 
for his licentiousness. 

Page 59, lines 16, 17. Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury ; Russell, 
Duke of Bedford ; Bentinck, Duke of Portland. 

1. 19. Chatham, Earl of, (William Pitt), (1708-1778), was 
known as the Great Commoner. He was the leader of the 
House of Commons, and held the positions of Secretary of 
State, to which Macaulay refers, and Lord Privy Seal. The 
student should read Macaulay's essay on Chatham. 

1. 19. Fox, Right Honorable Charles James, (1749-1806), was 
a noted statesman and author. He was a Liberal leader, was 
twice Secretary of State, and exerted a powerful influence in 
shaping the policy of the government. He opposed the con- 
tinental policy of Pitt, supported Wilberforce in his efforts to 
secure the abolition of slavery, and was always broad and 
progressive in his political views. 

1. 25. Censorship of the Press. An act licensing the publi- 
cation of periodicals under certain restrictions had been passed 
shortly after the Restoration, but had expired in 1679. There- 
after any person might print at his own risk anything he chose, 
except that no man had any right to print political news unless 
authorized by the Crown. For a time this rule was violated, but 
in the latter part of the reign of James II. no newspaper was 
allowed to be printed without his permission ; and until Steele 
and Addison began their publications political discussions were 
generally avoided. In 1693 the licensing and censorship of 
papers was forever abandoned. See Andrews' History of 
British JorirnaJism, Vol. I., p. 84. 



NOTES 173 

Page 60, line 8. Conduct of the Allies was a political tract 
written by Dean Swift in 1711. 

I. 9. The Freeholder was a political periodical conducted by 
Addison in support of the ministry, from December 23, 1715, to 
June 29, 171G. It included in all fifty-five numbers. In the 
first number he says: "I shall, in the course of this paper, 
endeavor to open the eyes of my countrymen to their own 
interest, — to show them the privileges of an English freeholder, 
which they enjoy in common with myself, and to make them 
sensible how these blessings are secured to us by his majesty's 
title, his administration, and his personal character." 

II. 16, 17. Antrim and Aberdeen were counties in the extreme 
northern part of Ireland and Scotland respectively. 

Page 61, line 3. Walpole, Sir Robert, (1676-1745), was Prime 
Minister, and practically ruled England from 1721 to 1742. For 
a most interesting discussion of his career, see McCarthy's Four 
Georges^ Vol. I. 

1. 3. Pulteney, William, Earl of Bath, (1682-1764), was an 
influential statesman and leader of the opposition party against 
Walpole. He was the author of many political pamphlets. 

1. 10. Grub Street, now known as Milton Street, was long 
the residence of index-makers, translators, copyists, small 
writers, etc. Johnson says: "It was originally the name of 
a street near Moorfields, much inhabited by authors of small 
histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean 
production is called Grub Street." 

1. 14. The Craftsman was really edited by Bolingbroke, who 
was assisted by Pulteney. This paper was made the medium 
for bitter attacks upon Walpole, and was so popular that some- 
times 10,000 to 12,000 copies were sold in a single day. 



174 NOTES 

1. 19. St. John, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke, (1678-1751), 
was a prominent Tory statesman. In the latter part of Anne's 
reign he was Prime Minister, but became involved in schemes 
to secure the return of the Stuarts, for which he was attainted. 
He fled to France in 1715, but was permitted to return to England 
in 1724, but not to enter Parliament. He joined Pulteney in 
his opposition to Walpole, and edited the Craftsman. 

Page 63, line 5. Nemesis. From t,he Greek word vificLv, to 
distribute or allot ; hence the divinity who allots to men, accord- 
ing to their deserts, either good or evil fortune. In Greece, 
however, this divinity came to be known as the avenger of evil 
deeds. She avenged pride and chastised the wicked. 

1. 13. Mary Montague, (1690-1762), was noted for the extent 
of her knowledge, the brilliancy of her conversational powers, 
the quickness of her wit, and the attractiveness of her person. 
She was the author of a series of brilliant letters, some poems 
and essays, and is noted as being the first to introduce inocula- 
tion for smallpox into England. 

1. 19. Stella was a Miss Esther Johnson, a lady of whom 
Swift became enamoured, and it is generally supposed that he 
was privately married to her. She was for many years his 
friend and companion, but never appeared publicly as his wife. 
The Journal to Stella is made up of letters which were hastily 
written to give pleasure to " Stella " and a few of his friends in 
Ireland. It is the most tender and pathetic of all his writings. 

1. 21. Steele, Sir Richard, (1671-1724), was the friend and 
associate of Addison. He was a brilliant writer, and was the 
editor of the Tatler, which he established, as well as of several 
other publications which succeeded it. 

1. 24. Terence, (185-159 b.c), was a Roman slave, who 
evinced so much talent that his master educated and finally 



NOTES 175 

freed him. He became a writer of comedies, and enjoyed the 
friendship of many of the best men in Rome. 

Page (i4, line 2. Young, Edward, (1684-1765) , was the author 
of Night Tlioughts. 

1. 19. Mr. Softly. A character in the Tatler. See No. 163. 

Page 65, line 7. Covent Garden is a corruption of Convent 
Garden^ so called because it was once the garden of Westminster 
Abbey. It is a square in London famous for its fruit and flower 
markets. 

Page m, line 22. Boswell, James, (1740-1795), was a Scotch 
lawyer who achieved fame by his servile devotion to Dr. John- 
son and for the biography which he wrote, and which is com- 
monly classed as the greatest work of the kind ever produced. 

1. 23. Warburton, William, (1698-1779), was an eminent 
English prelate. 

1. 23. Hurd, Richard, D.D., (1720-1808), was the lifelong 
friend of Bishop Warburton, whose biographer he was. He 
also wrote numerous pamphlets in vindication of the views of 
Warburton, who was a vigorous thinker and writer upon theo- 
logical subjects. 

Page 67, line 5. Budgell, Eustace, (1685-1736), was a dis- 
tant relative of Addison, and was largely dependent upon him 
for his support. He had some ability as a writer, and cultivated 
a style somewhat similar to that of his patron. He contributed 
a number of papers to the Tatler and Spectator. 

1. 22. Ambrose Phillipps, (1675-1719). Pope portrays him 
as follows : 

" The bard whom pilfered pastorals renown ; 
Just writes to make his barrenness appear, 
And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year." 



176 NOTES 

Page 68, line 2. Thomas Tickell, (1686-1740). His only 
well-known work is his "Elegy to Addison," of which Dr. John- 
son declares that " there is not a more sublime or more eloquent 
funeral poem to be found in the whole compass of English 
literature. ' ' 

1. 22. Spunging house was a house or tavern where people 
who were arrested for debt were allowed to lodge twenty-four 
hours before being taken to prison, in order to give their friends 
an opportunity for settling the debt. 

Page 69, line 21. Fielding, Henry, (1707-1754), was one of 
the earliest of English novelists. His best-known works are : 
The Adventures of Joseph Andrews^ Tom Jones, and Amelia. 

Page 70, line 15. Bayle, Pierre, (1647-1706), was a celebrated 
French philosopher and critic. His most important work was a 
Historical and Critical Dictionary. 

Page 72, line 16. Gerard Hamilton, (1729-1796), was known 
as " Single Speech Hamilton," on account of a brilliant speech 
which he made in Parliament in 1755, and although he retained 
his seat until his death he made only one more speech during his 
whole career. 

Page 73, line 20. Gazetteer was a person authorized by 
government to publish news, and who was given some access to 
official sources. Some one has said that his duties were to keep 
the official newspaper very innocent and very insipid. 

Page 75, line 1. Bickerstaff. " This man, (John Partridge), 
had for thirty years published prophetic almanacs of the kind 
not yet wholly extinct. Swift, under the pseudonym of Isaac 
Bickerstaff, published Predictions for the Year 1708^ which 
were not vague like those of Partridge, but gave the exact dates 
at which various interesting persons, among others Louis XIV., 



NOTES 177 

would die during that year. Bickerstaff declared himself a sin- 
cere astrologer, bent on the exposure of such frauds as the Mer- 
lins of the day. He prophesied, incidentally, that Partridge 
would die on the 29th of March, at about eleven o'clock at 
night. As soon as the date was past Swift issued another 
pamphlet giving An Account of Partridge'' s Death in very 
pathetic terms. The poor astrologer hastened to assure the 
world that he was still alive, upon which Swift promptly re- 
proved him in a Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, (1709), and 
in a black-letter. Merlin^ s Prophecy, Swift seems to have thrown 
himself body and soul into this ludicrous and fantastic contro- 
versy. ... It raged for two years, and Partridge was reduced 
to despair ; he lived on, however, until 1715." — Edmuxd Gosse, 
History of English Literature of the Eighteenth Century, page 
151. 

1. 14. The Tatler. The first number of this paper was issued 
April 12, 1709, and it continued to be published until January, 
1711. In all one hundred and seventy-one numbers were issued. 
The division of its contents was announced by the editor as fol- 
lows : "All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment 
shall be under the article of White's Chocolate House ; Poetry 
under that of Well's Coffee House ; Learning under the title of 
Grecian ; foreign and domestic news you will have from St. 
James' Coffee House ; and what else I shall on any other subject 
offer shall be dated from my own apartment. ' ' 

Page 76, line 13. Temple, Sir William, (1628-1699), was an 
eminent statesman and diplomatist, and was the author of 
numerous essays and letters. Johnson says: "He was the 
first writer who gave cadence to English prose." 

1. 17. Horace Walpole, (1717-1797), was the youngest son of 
Robert Walpole, and was noted for his Letters. 



178 NOTES 

1. 24. Menander, (342-291 e.g.), was one of the greatest 
masters of Greek comedy. Although he wrote more than one 
hundred plays, not one has come down to us enth-e. Our whole 
knowledge of his works, therefore, rests upon fragments and 
quotations. 

Page 77, line 1. Butler, Samuel, (1612-1G80), was the author 
of Hudibras, a long, coarse, but witty poem in which the Puri- 
tan is held up to ridicule, which frequently passes into indecency. 
The general design is based upon that of Don Quixote. The 
hero is a Presbyterian Justice of the Peace who, "in the confi- 
dence of legal authority and the rage of zealous ignorance, 
ranges the country to repress superstition and current abuses, 
accompanied by an independent clerk, disputatious and obsti- 
nate, with whom he often debates, but never conquers him." 

1. 3. Sir Godfrey Kneller, (1548-1723), was a famous Ger- 
man portrait painter, whose reputation seems to have exceeded 
his ability. He was court painter to Charles II., James II., and 
William. He also painted the portrait of Anne. 

1. 17. Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, (1608-1673), was an 
illustrious statesman and author. He was a prominent sup- 
porter of Charles I. , and was a companion of the young prince 
in his exile. His most important literary work was the History 
of the Rebellion. Granger says of him : " He particularly ex- 
cels in characters which, if drawn with precision and elegance, 
are as difficult to the writers as they are agreeable to the readers 
of history. He is in this particular as unrivalled among the 
moderns as Tacitus among the ancients." 

1. 21. Cervantes, (1547-1616), was the greatest of Spanish 
authors. His most famous work was Don Quixote^ which has 
been translated into all the languages of Europe. 



Wofm 179 

Page 78, line 9. Voltaire, (1694-1778), was a French poet, 
dramatist, historian, and philosopher. 

Page 79, line 8, Jack Pudding was a colloquial expression 
denoting a coarse or vulgar person. Cynic was the name of a 
school of Greek philosophy. It has become symbolical of an 
ignorant and insolent self-righteousness. 

1. 17. Abbe Coyer was a French Jesuit who devoted himself 
to literature. 

1. 20. Arbuthnot, John, M.D., (1675-1734 [?]), was a noted 
physician and writer. Dr. Johnson, in speaking of the eminent 
authors who flourished in Queen Anne's reign, says : " I think 
Dr. Arbuthnot the first man among them. He was the most 
universal genius, being an excellent physician, a man of deep 
learning, and a man of much humour. He joined with Pope, 
Gray, Swift, and some others to form the Scribblers' Club, 
whose object it was to ridicule all the false tastes in learning, 
under the character of a man of capacity, who had dipped into 
every art and science, but injudiciously in each. Among the 
works produced by this club were : The Fust Book of Martinus 
Scrihhlerus, by Arbuthnot ; Gulliver''s Travels, by Swift ; and 
the Art of LinJdng in Poetry, by Pope." 

1. 25. The World, Connoisseur, etc., were contemporary 
papers of low grade which the popularity of the Tatltr and 
Spectator called into existence. 

Page 80, line 21, Mephistopheles was the name of a per- 
sonification of the principle of evil, first appearing in the 
popular books and puppet shows of the middle ages, Mephis- 
topheles is the Satanic tempter of Faust in Goethe's Faust, 
and in Marlowe's drama t)f the same name, both of which the 
student should read. - - - 



180 NOTES 

I. 22. Puck, an elf or sprite. See Midsummer Night's 
Dream. 

1.22. Soame Jenyns, (1704-1787), was a poet and wit, chiefly 
remembered for his View of the Internal Evidence of the 
Christian Religion. 

II. 21, 22. Bettesworth, Franc de Pompignan, respectively 
were victims of the satire of Swift and Voltaire. 

Page 82, line 8. Jeremy Collier, (1050-1726), was an English 
bishop of great celebrity. In 1698 he published a Short View of 
the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which was 
an epoch-making book and effected a complete revolution in 
public opinion regarding the stage. For a powerful picture of 
the morals of the times, see the Essay on Milton, page 70. 

1. 10. Etherege, Sir George, (1636-1690), and Wycherley, 
William, (1640-1715), were both writers of immoral and licen- 
tious dramas. 

1. 17. Hale, Sir Matthew, (1609-1676), was an eminent 
lawyer and writer. Cowper says of him : 

" Immortal Hale ! for deep discernment praised, 
And sound integrity, not more than famed 
For sanctity of manners uudefiled." 

— The Task, Bk. III. 

1. 17. Tillotson. See sketch in Macaulay's 3Iiscellaneous 
Essays. 

1. 20. Vanbrugh, Sir John, (1666-1726), was distinguished 
both as an architect and a dramatic writer. His plays were 
nearly all comedies. 

Page 83, lines 8-11. These references are all to the Tatler, 
and should be looked up. 



NOTES 181 

" Tom Folio is a broker in learning, employed to get together 
good editions and to stock the libraries of great men.'' — Tatlei\ 
No. 158. 

" Ned Softly, a very pretty poet, and an admirer of easy 
lines." — Tatler, No. 163. 

"Political Upholsterer, a great news-monger."— TaiZer, 
Nos. 155 and 160. 

Court of Honor. — Taller, Nos. 250, 253, 256, 259, 262, and 
265. 

Memoirs of a Shilling. — Tatler, No. 249. 

Frozen Words. — Tatler, No. 254. 

Thermometer of Zeal. — Tatler, No. 220. 

1. 14. The reference is possibly to Tatler, No. 257. 

1. 17. Smalridge, George, D.D., (1663-1719), was Dean of 
Christ Church, and afterwards Bishop of Bristol. He was 
noted as an eloquent preacher. 

Page 84, line 5. Macaulay largely overestimates the value of 
Addison's work on the Tatler. Unprejudiced readers will find 
there much from the pen of Steele which is nearly or quite as 
good as much of that contributed by Addison. The Tatler was 
exceedingly popular throughout the entire series, yet Addison 
contributed only forty-two numbers, while Steele wrote one 
hundred and eighty-eight, and thirty-six were written con- 
jointly. 

1. 12. By the Act of Settlement in 1689, Anne was recog- 
nized as the legitimate successor of William of Orange, should 
he outlive his wife, Mary, who was the eldest daughter of James 
II. Anne was the second daughter of this king. After the 
death of the mother of these princesses James married again, 



182 NOTES 

and had a son, named James Francis Edward, who, upon the 
death of his father, claimed the throne as his by right. A Ithough 
he had astrong following in England, his claim was not recognized, 
and he was compelled to live in exile at the court of the king of 
France, who became his champion. If the French had conquered 
in the war of the Spanish Succession, they would undoubtedly 
have attempted to seat the "Pretender" upon the English 
throne. 

1. 20. In 1820, and in 1831. The agitation in behalf of 
Parliamentary reform. 

Page 85, line 4. Versailles was a suburban village, eleven 
miles from Paris, where Louis XIV. erected a magnificent 
palace, which was used by the French kings as a residence 
until 1792. It also contained one of the finest parks in the 
world. 

1. 5. Marli was located five miles north of Versailles, and 
contained the country house and gardens of Louis XIV. 

1. 6. St. James Palace was a residence of the British 
sovereigns. 

1. 15. White staff. The emblem of the office of Lord High 
Treasurer. 

Page 86, line 21. Walcheren was a small island off the shore 
of the Netherlands. It is famous in military history for an 
expedition undertaken by the British in 1809 against Antwerp. 
The leaders were incompetent, necessary supplies were not 
provided, and the expedition failed disastrously. Over 7,000 
men lost their lives on this island. 

Page 88, line 11. The Examiner. During the election 
Addison contributed five numbers to this paper, which was 
set up in opposition to a Tory paper of the same name. 



NOTES 183 

Page 90, line 5. The Spectator was issued daily from March 
1, 1711, until December 6, 1712. It consisted of five hundred 
and fifty-five numbers, of which Addison wrote two hundred 
and seventy-four, Steele two hundred and thirty-six, Hughes 
nineteen, and Pope one. 

Page 01, line 17. Richardson, Samuel, (1689-1761), was the 
first of the modern English novelists. He worked as a printer 
until he was fifty years of age. He then published Pamela^ 
and later Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison. He 
has been called "the inventor of the English novel." 

1. 18. Smollett, Tobias George, (1721-1771), was the third 
novelist of this epoch. Among his works are Boderick Ban- 
dom and Humphrey Clinker. 

Page 92, line 3. Mohawks, or Mohocks, were a class of 
ruffians who at one time infested the streets of London. One 
of their diversions was to roll hapless passers down Snow Hill 
in a tub ; another was to overturn coaches on rubbish heaps. 

1. 5. The Distressed Mother was a tragedy written by Am- 
brose Phillipps, which was little more than a free translation of 
Kacine's Andromaque. ' It contained an epilogue written by 
Addison. 

1. 9. All these personages are characters in the Sir Roger 
de Coverley Papers. 

Page 93, line 10. nabob was originally the viceroy or gov- 
ernor of a province in India. Later many of the nabobs be- 
came independent monarchs. 

1. 14. Lucian, who lived in the first century b.c, was a 
Greek wit, essayist, and satirist. 

1. 16. Tales of Scheherazade : the Arabian Nights. 



184 NOTES 

1.18. La Bruydre, Jean de, (1645-1696), was a distinguished 
French writer and moralist. According to some critics he is 
the greatest painter of manners and morals who has ever writ- 
ten in French. 

1. 24. Massillon, Jean Baptiste, (1663-1742), was a noted 
French pulpit orator, whose sermons are models of artistic 
beauty and are more largely concerned with morals and mo- 
tives than with dogmas and doctrines. 

Page 95, line 2. Chevy Chace was one of the most famous 
of early English ballads. It takes for its subject matter an 
affray between Lord Percy and the Douglas on the Scottish 
border. 

1, 8. Upon the imposition of the tax, which was a duty laid 
upon newspapers, in the shape of a red stamp, the Spectator 
doubled its price and said, "This is the day on which many 
eminent writers will probably publish their last works. I am 
afraid that few of our weekly historians, who are men that, 
above others, delight in war, will be able to subsist under the 
weight of a stamp and approaching peace." This act continued 
in force for nearly a century and a half. 

Page 96, line 13. The Guardian began to appear March 12, 
1713, and ran through one hundred and seventy-six numbers, 
the last appearing October 1, 1713. Steele wrote eighty-two 
numbers, and other contributors were Addison, Berkeley, Pope, 
Hughes, etc. It was during the publication of the Guardian 
that Steele and Addison became finally estranged. 

Macaulay in his zeal for Addison has probably drawn the 
contrast far too strongly. It will be interesting to read in this 
connection Johnson's summary of the relations existing be- 
tween these two distinguished men : 



NO TES 185 

"At the school of the Chartreux, to which he (Addison) 
was removed, he pursued his juvenile studies under the care 
of Dr. Ellis, and contracted that intimacy with Sir Richard 
Steele which their joint labors have so effectually recorded. 

"Of this memorable friendship the greater praise must be 
given to Steele. It is not hard to love those from whom noth- 
ing can be feared ; and Addison never considered Steele as a 
rival ; but Steele lived, as he confesses, under an habitual 
subjection to the predominating genius of Addison, whom he 
always mentioned with reverence and treated with obsequi- 
ousness. 

"Addison, who knew his own dignity, could not always for- 
bear to show it by playing a little upon his admirer ; but he was 
in no danger of retort ; his jests were endured without resist- 
ance or resentment. But the sneer of jocularity was not the 
worst. Steele, whose imprudence of generosity, or vanity of 
profusion, kept him always incurably necessitous, upon some 
pressing exigence, in an evil hour borrowed a hundred pounds 
of his friend, probably without much purpose of repayment, 
but Addison, who seems to have had other notions of a hun- 
dred pounds, grew impatient of delay, and reclaimed his loan 
by an execution. Steele felt with great sensibility the ob- 
duracy of his creditor, but with emotions of sorrow rather 
than of anger." 

The following passage from the "Dedication of the Drum- 
mer," written by Steele, is also significant : 

"All the papers marked with a C, L., I., or 0., that is to 
say, all the papers which I have distinguished by any letter in 
the name of the muse Clio, were given me by the gentleman 
of whose assistance I formerly boasted in the preface and con- 
cluding leaf of the Tatler. I am much more proud of his 
long-continued friendship than I should be of the fame of 



186 NOTES 

being thought the author of any writings of which lie himself 
is capable of producing. " 

Page 97, line 3. Cato. Tickell says : "He took up a design 
of writing a play upon this subject when he was at the uni- 
versity, and even attempted something in it then, though not a 
line as it now stands. The work was performed by him in his 
travels, and retouched in England, without any formed de- 
sign of bringing it out upon the stage." 

Page 98, line 1. Macready, William Charles, (1793-1873), 
was one of the last great Shakespearian actors, and was ranked 
as one of the most illustrious of his profession. 

1. 3. Cato, Sempronius, Juba, and Marcia were all historic 
characters. 

1. 7. Booth, Barton, (1681-1733), was a prominent actor, a 
good classical scholar, and a poet of some renown. 

1. 11. Sir Gilbert Heathcote was a wealthy merchant and a 
stanch Whig. 

Page 99, line 12. Sir Gibby refers to Heathcote. 
1. 24. Garth, Sir Samuel, (1660-1719), was a poet and phy- 
sician. He was a prominent member of the Kit Cat Club. 

Page 100, line 11. Dictator. Marlborough was at that time 
suspected of an ambitious aim to obtain the post of general-in- 
chief for life. 

1. 22. the Act at Oxford. In English universities an act is 
an exercise, such as the thesis publicly maintained, performed 
by a student before he receives a degree. Here reference is 
made to the time at which the theses were discussed and the 
degrees were- given, correspmiding, to some extent, to our Com- 
mencement season. (See Murray'' s Dictionary, under " Act.") 



NOTES 1§7 

Page 101, line 8. Schiller, (1759-1805), was a German his- 
torian, dramatist, and poet. Among his greatest works are a 
History of the Thirty Years' TFar, Wallenstein^ Marie Stuart, 
William Tell, and the 3Iaid of Orleans. Next to Goethe, he 
ranks as Germany's greatest poet. 

11. 11-12. Athalie, by Racine. Saul, by Alfieri, an Italian 
poet. Cinan, by Corneille, a French dramatist. 

1. 25. John Dennis, (1657-1734), was a dramatic and polit- 
ical writer and critic. He criticised Pope's Essay on Criticism, 
but not as severely as the Cato. In return Pope held him up 
to ridicule in the Dunciad. However much Macaulay may 
have exaggerated Pope's failings, he certainly did not possess 
Addison's gentle and forgiving spirit. 

Page 104, line 1. the lampoon on Atticus was first printed 
in 1723, then included by Pope in his JSliscellanies in 1727, and 
finally, after undergoing revision, was engrafted into the Epis- 
tle to Arhuthnot, and published in 1735. In its first printed 
form it was as follows : 

" If Dennis writes and rails in furious pet, 

I'll answer D when I am in debt. 

If meager Gildon draws his meager quill, 
I wish the man a dinner and sit still. 
But should there one whose better stars conspire 
To form a bard and raise a genius higher, 
Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
And born to live, converse, and write with ease ; 
Should such a one, resolved to reign alone, 
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne, 
View him with jealous, yet with scornful eyes ; 
Hate him for arts that caused himself to rise, 
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, 
And without sneer teach the rest to sneer. 



188 NOTES 

Alike reserved to blame or to commend, 
A timorous foe and a suspicious friend, 
Fearing ev'n fools, by flatterers besieged, 
And so obliging that he ne'er obliged ; 
Willing to wound, yet afraid to strike. 
Just hit the fault and hesitate dislike. 
Who, when two wits on rival themes contest, 
Approves of both, but likes the w^orse the best: 
Like Cato gives his little senate laws. 
And sits attentive to his own applause ; 
While wits and templars every sentence raise, 
And wonder with a foolish face of praise. 
Who would not laugh if such a man there be? 
Who would not laugh if Atticus were he? " 

1. 1. Sporus. In Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arhuthnot this 
name was used for Lord John Hervey, the son of the Earl of 
Bristol, to whom Pope made several slighting allusions in his 
Miscellanies and the Dunciad, for what reason is not known. 
In 1734: appeared the Imitation of the First Book of Horace, 
where Lord Henry was twice attacked under the sobriquet of 
"Lord Fanny," and his friend Lady Mary Wortley Moiitagiie 
was still more scandalously aspersed. The Character of Sporus 
followed soon after, and he was again attacked in a subsequent 
work. 

1. 11. peripetia : the sudden disclosure of circumstances 
upon which the plot of the play hinges. 

Page 106, line 3. The Englishman was a continuation of 
the Guardian. It was published through fifty-seven numbers, 
and was mainly political. Steele was expelled from the House 
on account of certain "scandalous and seditious libels" which 
were published in this paper. 



NOTES 189 

Page 108, line 4. Sir James Mackintosh, (1765-1832), was 
one of the most distinguished of modern philosophers. 

1. 20. Lord John Russell, (1702-1878), was an influential 
Whig statesman. He was prime minister from IS-IO to 1852, 
and again from 1865 to 1866. 

1. 20. Sir Robert Peel, (1788-1850), was one of the leading 
statesmen of the present century, first a Tory and then a Whig. 
He was jprime minister from 1841 to 1846. 

1. 20. Lord Palmerston, (1784-1865), was another prominent 
statesman of the Liberal party. He was prime minister from 
1855 to 1858, and again from 1859 to 1865. These three men 
were among the most noted figures in the political world in 
Macaulay's time. 

Page 109, line 14. Sunderland, Charles Spencer, third Earl 
of, (1674-1722), was highly honored by George I., who made 
him successively Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Privy Seal, 
and Prime Minister. 

Page 110, line 17. the Tale of a Tub is a powerful satire on 
the superstitions, fanaticism, and abuses of the times. It proved 
a serious hindrance to its author's advancement in both religious 
and political circles. 

Page 111, lines 12-15. 

" And let us in the tumult of the fray 
Avoid each other's spears, for there will be 
Of Trojans and their renowned allies 
Enough for me to slay whene'er a god 
Shall bring them in my way. 

In turn for thee 
Are many Greeks to smite whomever thou and I 
Canst overcome." 

7Zm(Z, VL, 226-229. Bryant's Ti'ansr' 



190 NOTES 

Page 113, line 6. the Board of Trade in England is a branch 
of the government which deals with commerce and statistics. 

1. 17. the Rebellion was a rising of the Jacobites, under the 
leadership of the Earl of Mar, who was defeated and the insur- 
rection was put down by the Duke of Argyle. 

1. 18. The Freeholder was first issued in 1715, and continued 
through fifty-five numbers to June, 1716. This paper was de- 
voted almost exclusively to the discussion of political questions. 

Page 115, line 2. Town Talk ran from December 17, 1714, 
to February 13, 1716. The Reader appeared in 1714, but only 
nine numbers were issued. The Letter to a Bailiff was pub- 
lished in 1713, and the Crisis in 1714. It is hardly necessary 
to call attention to Macaulay's spirit of partisanship as dis- 
played in this sentence. 

1. 19. Rosicrucians were a secret society reported to 
have been founded in the fourteenth century by Christian 
Rosenkreuz, who had resided for many years among Arabian 
and Egyptian magicians. Wonderful stories are told about the 
magical deeds wrought by the Kosicrucians and the strange 
spirits who did their bidding, some of whom are named in the 
text. It seems to be quite certain, however, that no such 
society ever existed and that the whole story was simply a 
satire. 

Page 116, line 23. Akenside, Mark, (1721-1770), was a 
physician and poet. Bucke says of the poem referred to, '^' he 
has imited the grace of Vergil, the colouring of Milton, the 
incidental expression of Shakespeare, to paint the finest feat- 
ures of the human mind and the most lovely forms of morality 
and religion." 



NOTES IM 

Page 117, line 10. Herder, Johann Gottfried, (1744-1803), 
was one of the founders of modern German literature. He 
was Goethe's friend and teacher. 

1. 10. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, (1749-1832), was the great- 
est of German poets and authors. Among his works are : Wil- 
helm Meister, Faust, Hermann and Dorothea, and Tasso. 

1. 11. Hume, David, (1711-1776), was the most noted of 
modern skeptical philosophers, and a distinguished essayist and 
historian. 

Page 122, lines 1-2. The Satirist and the Age were low- 
lived publications of that day. 

1. 13, In an epistle to the Earl of Burlington, published in 
1731, and entitled, Of the Use of Biches, he gave a description 
of Simon's Villa, designed to illustrate the false taste of mag- 
nificence, in which he was accused of attacking a benefactor by 
ridiculing the house, grounds, and ostentatious hospitality of the 
Duke of Chandos. 

1. 15. Aaron Hill was a dramatic writer of some celebrity, 
though without much merit. In the treatise on Bathos Pope 
classed him with the geniuses called "Flying Fishes, who now 
and then rise on their fins and fly out of the profound : but their 
wings are soon dry and they drop down to the bottom." 

1. 17. Lady Mary Wortley Montague was sarcastically 
alluded to in the Dunciad, Bk. II., 1. 135. 

Page 123, line 8. gross perfidy to Bolingbroke. Pope is 
accused of a serious breach of trust in this case, in printing 
certain letters of Bolingbroke's. 

Page 124, line 12. Earl of Warwick was the son of the 
Countess of Warwick, whom Addison afterwards married. 



192 NOTES 

Page 125, line 18. Sir Peter Teazle and Joseph Surface are 

characters in Sheridan's School for Scandal. 

Page 126, line 24. The Countess Dowager was the head of 
the house which was descended from the famous Richard 
Neville, Earl of Warwick, who made and deposed kings during 
the Wars of the Roses. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas 
Middleton. 

Page 127, line 2. Holland House is a picturesque Elizabethan 
mansion near London. It was built in 1607 and descended to 
Henry Rich, first Earl of Holland, for whom it was named. 
Por nearly two centuries and a h^lf it was the favorite resort of 
wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philoso- 
phers, and statesmen. 

1. 4. Nell Gwynn was an actress, born m London about 
1650. She was a favorite of Charles II. 

Page 128, line 6. Lycidas. The reference is to Milton's 
memorial poem, which was written upon the death of his friend, 
Edward King, who was drowned in St. George's Channel, in 
1637. 

1. 16. William Somerville, (1667-1742), made his literary 
reputation by a long poem entitled Hie Chase. 

Page 130, line 9. Joseph Hume, (1777-1855), was a political 
reformer, who, as a member of Parliament, sought to check 
unnecessary expenditures, and to secure the passage of measures 
favorable to the working classes. 

Page 131, line 11. House of Rich. Holland House was so 
called because the family name of its founder was Rich. Many 
anecdotes are on record relating to Addison's tavern resorts 
when Holland House was rendered disagreeable by the haughty 



NOTES 193 

caprices of his aristocratic bride. Wlien he had suffered any 
vexation from her he would propose to withdraw the club from 
Button's, who had been a servant in the countess's family. 

Page 134, line 4. The Plebeian. 1. 12. The Old Whig. In 
1718 a bill was introduced into Parliament proposing to fix the 
number of peers, and restraining the king from any new creation 
of nobility. This bill was the cause of much acrimonious dis- 
cussion, in the course of which Steele attacked it bitterly in a 
pamphlet called The Plebeian, which was answered in a pam- 
phlet called the Old Whig, by Addison. Steele replied in a 
second Plebeian, which was followed by another Old Whig. In 
all there were four issues of the former and two of the latter. 

Page 135, line 2. " Little Dicky." This matter is referred 
to by Macaulay in a letter written to the editor of the Edinburgh 
Beview, July 22, 1843, as follows: 

" I hear generally favorable opinions about my article. I am 
much pleased with one thing : You may remember how con- 
fidently I asserted that ' little Dicky ' in the Old Whig was the 
nickname of some comic actor. Several people thought I risked 
too much in assuming this so strongly on mere internal evidence. 
I have now, by an odd accident, found out who the actor was. 
An old prompter in Drury Lane Theatre, named Chetwood, 
published, in 1749, a small volume containing an account of all 
the famous performers whom he remembers, arranged in alpha- 
betical order. Tliis little volume I picked up yesterday, for a 
sixpence, at a bookstore in Holborn, and the first name on which 
I opened was that of Henry Norris, a favorite comedian, who 
was nicknamed 'Dicky,' because he first obtained celebrity by 
acting the part of ' Dicky ' in the Trip to the Jubilee. ... I 
am a little vain of my sagacity, which I really think would have 
dubbed me a ' vir clarissimus ' if it had been shown in a point 
o 



194 NOTES 

of Greek or Latin learning ; but I am still more pleased that the 
vindication of Addison from an unjust charge, which has been 
universally believed since the publication of the Lives of the 
Foets, should thus be complete. Should you have any objection 
to inserting a short note at the end of the next number ? Ten 
lines would suffice, and the matter is really interesting to all 
lovers of literary history," 

The note was inserted in the Edinburgh Beview, Vol. CLVIII. , 
Ch. VIII., 550, as follows : 

" In our review of Miss Aiken's Life of Addison we remarked 
that the ' little Dicky ' mentioned in the Old Whig could not 
possibly be Sir Richard Steele. We expressed our opinion that, 
in all probability, ' little Dicky ' was the nickname of some 
comic actor who played the part of Gomez in Dryden's Spanish 
Friar. 

" We have since ascertained that our conjecture was correct. 
The performer to whom Addison alluded was Henry Norris, a 
man of remarkably small stature, but of great native humour, 
whose strength lay in such characters as that of Gomez. Norris 
had greatly distinguished himself by his ludicrous performance 
of the part of Dicky, the serving man, in Farquhar''s Trip to the 
Jubilee, and had thus earned the nickname of 'little Dicky.' 
He was at the height of his popularity in the year 1719, when 
the Old Whig appeared. An account of him will be found in 
the General History of the Stage, published about a century 
ago by one Chetwood, who had been, during twenty years, 
prompter at Drury Lane Theatre." 

1. 10. The Duenna was a play written by Sheridan and first 
produced in 1775. 

Page 137, line 5. Gay, John, (1688-1732), was a poet and 



NOTES 195 

play-writer. He had considerable merit as a poet, but as a man 
was indolent and irresolute, though amiable. 

Page 139, line 20. Jerusalem Chamber was an apartment in 
the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, where Henry IV. is said to 
have been buried. It derived its name from the fact that it was 
hung with tapestries representing the history of Jerusalem. 

1. 21. the Abbey. Westminster Abbey, as it now exists, 
was rebuilt on the site of an older abbey, built by Edward the 
Confessor in 1245, by Henry III. It is shaped like a cross and 
contains, besides nave, choir, and transepts, twelve chapels, of 
which ten are nearly filled with monumental tombs. Seventeen 
English kings and ten queens lie within the Abbey amid states- 
men, poets, divines, scholars, and artists. Dean Stanley says : 
"The Abbey of Westminster owes its traditions and its present 
name, revered in the bosoms of the people of England, to the 
fact that the early English kings were interred within its walls 
and that through its associations the Norman rulers learnt to 
forget their foreign paternity and to unite in fellowship and 
affection with their Saxon fellow-citizens. There is no other 
church in the world, except, perhaps, the Kremlin in Moscow, 
with which royalty is so intimately associated." 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Aaron Hill, 191. 

Abbe Coyer, 179. 

Abbey, The, 195. 

Aberdeen, 173. 

Absalom and Ahitophel, 159. 

Academy, The, 158. 

Act at Oxford, 186. 

Act of Settlement, 167, 181. 

" After his bees," 155. 

Agbarus, 150. 

Age, 191. 

Ambrose Phillipps, 175. 

Antrim, 173. 

Ariosto, 169. 

Athalie, 187. 

Atticus, 147. 

Ausonius, 148. 

Barometer, Lines on, 151. 
Bayle, 176. 
Bentinck, 172. 
Bentley, 150. 
Berni, 169. 
Bettesworth, 180. 
Bickerstaff, 176. 
Biographia Britannica, 145. 



Blackmore, 150. 

Blair, Dr., 145. 

Blenheim, 167. 

Blois, 157. 

Board of Trade, 190. 

Boccaccio, 169. 

Boiardo, 169. 

Boileau, 157. 

Book of Gold, 162. 

Booth, 186. 

Boswell, 175. 

*' Both the great chiefs of the 

ministry," 156. 
Bowling Green, Lines on, 151. 
Bourne, Vincent, 160. 
Boyle, 150. 
Boyne River, 168. 
Bradamante, 144. 
Brunell, 154. 
Buchanan, George, 148. 
Budgell, 175. 
Butler, 178. 
Button's, 145, 152. 

Callimachus, 149. 
Canning, Mr., 166. 
197 



198 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Caprese, 163. 

Captain General Marlborough, 

165. 
Cato, 186. 
Catullus, 147. 

Censorship of the Press, 172. 
Cervantes, 178. 
Chancellor, His, 147. 
Charter House, 146. 
Chatham, 172. 
Chevy Chace, 184. 
Childs, 152. 
Cinan, 187. 
Clarendon, 178. 
Clandian, 147. 
Cock-Lane Ghost, 149. 
Coffee-Houses, 151. 
Conduct of the Allies, 173. 
Congreve, 144, 152. 
Connoisseur, The, 178. 
Countess Dowager, 192. 
Court of Honor, 181. 
Cowper, William, 166. 
Craftsman, The, 173. 
Crisis, The, 190. 

Dacier, 156. 

Dante, 169. 

Dauphin, 161. 

Dennis, 147. 

Dictator, 186. 

Dissenters, 165. 

Dissertation on the Epistles of 

Phalaris, 151. 
Distressed Mother, 1^6^183. 



Dr. Arne, 170. 

Dorset, 155. 

Dryden, 152. 

Duchess of Marlborough, 171. 

Duenna, The, 194. 

Duke, 154. 

Duke of Shrewsbury, 164. 

Dunkirk, 146. 

Earl of Nottingham, 166. 
Electoral Prince of Hanover, 171. 
Elegiacs, 160. 
Empress Faustina, 169. 
Englishman, The, 188. 
Epistles of Phalaris, 151. 
Erasmus, 159. 
Etherege, 180. 
Examiner, The, 182. 

Faithless Ruler of Savoy, 165. 

Ferrara, 169. 

Fielding, 176. 

Fiercer Conflict, 164. 

Fox, 172. 

Fracastorius, 159. 

Francesca da Rimini, 170. 

Franchises, 144. 

Freeholder, The, 163, 173, 190. 

Frozen Words, 181. 

Garraway's, 152. 

Garth, 186. 

Gay, 194. 

Gazetteer, 176. 

Genoa, 162. 

Gerano-Pygmseomachia, 160. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



199 



Gilbert Heathcote, Sir, 186. 

Godfrey Kneller, Sir, 178. 

Godolphin, 165. 

Goethe, 191. 

Grand Alliance, 165. 

Granville, 155. 

Gray, Thomas, 160. 

Grecian, The, 152. 

Gross Perfidy to Bolingbroke, 191. 

Grub Street, 173. 

Guardian, 184. 

Hale, 180. 

Halifax, 166. 

Hampton Court, 145. 

Herder, 191. 

Heroic Couplet, 153. 

Hobbes, 158. 

Holland House, 192. 

Holy Week, 163. 

Hoole, 154. 

Horace Walpole, 177. 

Horace, 149. 

" Hot and sickly months," 164. 

House of Rich, 192. 

Hume, 191. 

Hurd, 175. 

Hurley, 171. 

Hymn, 161. 

Infanta, 146. 

Ireland's Vortigern, 150. 

Italicus, Silius, 148. 

Jack Pudding, 179. 
Jacobltism, 163. 



James Mcintosh, Sir, 189. 
Jeremy Collier, 180. 
Jerusalem Chamber, 195. 
John Dennis, 187. 
John Philips, 168. 
John Russell, Lord, 189. 
Johnson's, Dr., tragedy, 145. 
Jonathan's, 152. 
Jonson, Ben, 153. 
Joseph Hume, 192. 
Joseph Surface, 192. 
Juba, 186. 
Juvenal, 149. 

Kit Cat Club, 156. 
Knight, 144. 

La Bruyere, 184. 
Lake Benacus, 162. 
Lampoon on Atticus, 187. 
Laputan Flapper, 144. 
Lessing, 159. 
Letter to a Bailiff, 190. 
Lifeguardsman Shaw, 167. 
Little Dicky, 193. 
Livy, 148. 
Lord Eldon, 166. 
Lorenzo de' Medici, 169. 
Lucan, 149. 
Lucian, 183. 
Lucretius, 147. 
Lycidas, 192. 

Machiavelli, 169. 
Machinse-Gesticulantes, 160. 



20i) 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Macready, 186. 

Magdalene College, 147. 

Malbranche, 157. 

Mamelukes, 167. 

Marcia, 186. 

Marli, 182. 

Martial, 170. 

Marvel, 153. 

Mary Wortley Montague, 174, 191. 

Massillon, 184. 

Memoirs of a Shilling, 181. 

Menander, 178. 

Mephistopheles, 179. 

Metamorphoses, 148. 

Mohawks, 183. 

Mont Cenis, 165. 

Montague, Charles, 152. 

Museum, 164. 

Nabob, 183. 
Ned Softly, 181. 
Nell Gwynn, 192. 
Nemesis, 174. 
Newdigate prize, 153. 
Newmarket, 167. 
Newton, 157. 

October Club, The, 152. 
Oldham, 153. 
Old Whig, 193. 
Opera of Rosamond, 170. 
Order of the Garter, 170. 

Psestum, 163. 
Palmerston, Lord, 189. 
Pantheon, 162. 



Papist, A, 147. 
Parnell, Thomas, 145. 
Peace of Ryswick, 156. 
Pentheus, 148. 
Pere Fraguier, 160. 
Peripetia, 188. 
Peter Teazle, Sir, 192. 
Petrarch, 169. 
Philip v., 163. 
Pindar, 149. 
Plebeian, The, 193. 
Plutarch, 149. 
Political Upholsterer, 181. 
Pollio, 159. 
Polybius, 148. 
Posilipo, 163, 
President, A, 147. 
Prior, Matthew, 144, 156. 
Prince Eugene, 164. 
Prudentius, 148. 
Puck, 180. 
Pulteney, 173. 

Queen's College, 146. 

Racine, 156. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 144. 
Rasselas, 155. 
Reader, The, 190. 
Rebellion, The, 190. 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 158. 
Richardson, 183. 
Robert Peel, Sir, 189. 
Robertson, 159. 
Rochester, 153. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



201 



Rosicrucians, 190. 
Rowe, 170. 
Rutulians, The, 169. 

Sacheverell, 171. 

St. James', 152. 

St. James Palace, 182. 

St. John, 174. 

St. Peter's, 162. 

Salvator Rosa, 163. 

San Marino, 162. 

Santa Croce, 170. 

Satirist, 191. 

Saul, 187. 

Schiller, 187. 

Seatonian Prize, 153. 

Sempronius, 186. 

Seymour, Charles, 155. 

Sidonius Apollinarius, 169. 

Similitude of the Angel, 167. 

Sir Gibby, 186. 

Sm'alridge, 181. 

Smollett, 183. 

Soame Jenyns, 180. 

Softly, Mr., 175. 

Somers, 155, 166. 

Spectator, 161, 183. 

Spectre Huntsman, 170. 

Splendid Shilling, The, 168. 

Sporus, 188. 

Spunging House, 176. 

States-General, 161. 

Statius, 148. 

Steele, 174. 

Steenkirks, 144. 



Stella, 174. 
Stepney, 154. 
Sunderland, 166, 189. 

Talbot, 155, 172. 
Tale of a Tub, 189. 
Tales of Scheherazade, 183. 
Tallard, 168. 
Tangier, 146. 
Tasso, 154, 162, 169. 
Tatler, The, 176, 181. 
Tax on Newspapers, 184. 
Temple, 176. 
Terence, 174. 
Theobald's, 144. 
Theocritus, 148. 
Thermometer of Zeal, 182. 
Thomas Tickell, 176. 
Thrale, Mrs., 158. 
Thundering Legion, 150. 
Ticin, 169. 
Tillotson, 146, 180. 
Toast, A, 156. 
Tom Folio, 181. 
Tomb of Misenus, 164. 
Tory Fox-hunter, 163. 
Town Talk, 190. 

Vanbrugh, 180. 
Vatican, 164. 
Versailles, 182. 
Vico, 163. 

Victor Amadeus, 165. 
Vincenzio Filicaja, 170. 
Voltaire, 179. 



Exercises in Rhetoric and English 
Composition. 

By GEORGE R. CARPENTER, 

Professor of Rhetoric and English Composition, Columbia College. 

HIGH SCHOOL COURSE. SEVENTH EDITION. 
i6mo. Cloth. Price 75 cents, net. 

ADVANCED COURSE. FOURTH EDITION. 
i2mo. Cloth. Price $1.00, net. 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 



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BASED ON SEVEN MODERN ENGLISH ESSAYS. 

By W. T. BREWSTER, A.M., 

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 

ee FIFTH AVENUE. NEW YORK. 



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